The present work deals with the development of a framework dedicated to the construction of constitutive models with non-local internal variables. Such internal variables allow considering the impact of microstructural changes on the current state of a material point. Non-locality is introduced by considering, not only the spatial average, but also the spatial variance of an internal variable in constitutive relations. The proposed framework relies on continuum thermodynamics to construct the set of constitutive equations. Such a framework allows including some information regarding the spatial distribution of internal variables when constructing non-local models for thermomechanical applications. In contrast with gradient-type models, this strategy does not require additional equilibrium equations and boundary conditions. For the purpose of illustration, some numerical examples are presented. According to the numerical results, the proposed framework can be used to circumvent the difficulties associated with excessive spatial localization or to consider size effects.

目前的工作涉及开发一个专门用于构建具有非局部内部变量的本构模型的框架。这种内部变量允许考虑微观结构变化对材料点当前状态的影响。通过考虑本构关系中内部变量的空间平均和空间方差来引入非局部性。所提出的框架依赖于连续热力学来构建本构方程组。这样的框架允许在为热机械应用构建非局部模型时包含一些关于内部变量空间分布的信息。与梯度型模型相比，这种策略不需要额外的平衡方程和边界条件。为了说明的目的，给出了一些数值示例。根据数值结果，所提出的框架可用于规避与过度空间定位相关的困难或考虑尺寸效应。