Nonlocal strain and stress gradient elasticity of Timoshenko nano-beams with loading discontinuities

A unified approach is applied for determining both strain- and stress-driven differential formulations of Timoshenko nano-beams in presence of loading discontinuities. The consequent models can simulate small scale effects with different types of constitutive laws (such as pure nonlocal, mixture of local and nonlocal phases, and nonlocal gradient). A specific novel feature of the proposed models is the ability to consider loading discontinuities, i.e. points of discontinuities for generalized internal forces occurring in presence of external supports, forces, or couples concentrated at internal points of the nano-beam. To this end, novel constitutive continuity conditions (CCCs) are imposed at the beam interior points of loading discontinuities. CCCs contain integral convolutions of generalized forces or displacements over suitable parts of the nano-beam; they represent a valid alternative to Dirac delta function and are different from the well-known constitutive boundary conditions (CBCs) imposed at the end-points of the nano-beam. Finally, the proposed models are applied for finding closed-form solutions to cases of practical interest.