Frontiers in inelastic continuum mechanics

Summary The appropriate modelling of inelastic solid continua is among the most challenging tasks in applied and theoretical mechanics. This active field of research is located at the intersection of engineering disciplines, physics, materials sciences, and mathematics and has attracted studies not only within the last decades but over centuries. Nevertheless, reliable constitutive models to which (almost) all scientists in these communities agree, seem to reduce to linear elastic concepts so that severe assumptions must be accepted which lead to a rather limited applicability.