On the regularity of curvature fields in stress-driven nonlocal elastic beams

Elastostatic problems of Bernoulli–Euler nanobeams, involving internal kinematic constraints and discontinuous and/or concentrated force systems, are investigated by the stress-driven nonlocal elasticity model. The field of elastic curvature is output by the convolution integral with a special averaging kernel and a piecewise smooth source field of elastic curvature, pointwise generated by the bending interaction. The total curvature is got by adding nonelastic curvatures due to thermal and/or electromagnetic effects and similar ones. It is shown that fields of elastic curvature, associated with piecewise smooth source fields and bi-exponential kernel, are continuously differentiable in the whole domain. The nonlocal elastic stress-driven integral law is then equivalent to a constitutive differential problem equipped with boundary and interface constitutive conditions expressing continuity of elastic curvature and its derivative. Effectiveness of the interface conditions is evidenced by the solution of an exemplar assemblage of beams subjected to discontinuous and concentrated loadings and to thermal curvatures, nonlocally associated with discontinuous thermal gradients. Analytical solutions of structural problems and their nonlocal-to-local limits are evaluated and commented upon.