Fractional strain-gradient plasticity

We develop a strain-gradient plasticity theory based on fractional derivatives of plastic strain and assess its ability to reproduce the scaling laws and size effects uncovered by the recent experiments of Mu et al. (2014, 2016, 2017) on copper thin layers undergoing plastically constrained simple shear. We show that the size-scaling discrepancy between conventional strain-gradient plasticity and the experimental data is resolved if the inhomogeneity of the plastic strain distribution is quantified by means of fractional derivatives of plastic strain. In particular, the theory predicts that the size scaling exponent is equal to the fractional order of the plastic-strain derivatives, which establishes a direct connection between the size scaling of the yield stress and fractionality.