Creep and relaxation tests, performed on various materials like polymers, rubbers and so on are well-fitted by power-laws with exponent β ∈ [0, 1] (Nutting (1921), Di Paola et al. (2011)). The consequence of this observation is that the stress-strain relation of hereditary materials is ruled by fractional operators (Scott Blair (1947), Slonimsky (1961). A large amount of researches have been performed in the second part of the last century with the aim to connect constitutive fractional relations with some mechanical models by means of fractance trees and ladders (see Podlubny (1999)). Recently, Di Paola and Zingales (2012) proposed a mechanical model that corresponds to fractional stress-strain relation with any real exponent and they have proposed a description of above model ). In this study the authors aim to extend the study to cases with more fractional phases and to fractional Kelvin-Voigt model of hereditariness.

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a b s t r a c tIn this paper, electrical analogous models of fractional hereditary materials are introduced. Based on recent works by the authors, mechanical models of materials viscoelasticity behavior are firstly approached by using fractional mathematical operators. Viscoelastic models have elastic and viscous components which are obtained by combining springs and dashpots. Various arrangements of these elements can be used, and all of these viscoelastic models can be equivalently modeled as electrical circuits, where the spring and dashpot are analogous to the capacitance and resistance, respectively. The proposed models are validated by using modal analysis. Moreover, a comparison with numerical experiments based on finite difference time domain method shows that, for long time simulations, the correct time behavior can be obtained only with modal analysis. The use of electrical analogous in viscoelasticity can better reveal the real behavior of fractional hereditary materials.

Abstract. The aim of this paper is to propose a fractional viscoelastic and viscoplastic model of asphalt mixtures using experimental data of several tests such as creep and creep recovery performed at different temperatures and at different stress levels. From a best fitting procedure it is shown that both the creep one and recovery curve follow a power law model. It is shown that the suitable model for asphalt mixtures is a dashpot and a fractional element arranged in series. The proposed model is also available outside of the linear domain but in this case the parameters of the model depend on the stress level.

Fractional hereditary materials are characterized for the presence, in the stress-strain relations, of fractional-order operators with order beta a[0,1]. In Di Paola and Zingales (J. Rheol. 56(5):983-1004, 2012) exact mechanical models of such materials have been extensively discussed obtaining two intervals for beta: (i) Elasto-Viscous (EV) materials for 0a parts per thousand currency sign beta a parts per thousand currency sign1/2; (ii) Visco-Elastic (VE) materials for 1/2a parts per thousand currency sign beta a parts per thousand currency sign1. These two ranges correspond to different continuous mechanical models. \ud \ud In this paper a discretization scheme based upon the continuous models proposed in Di Paola and Zingales (J. Rheol. 56(5):983-1004, 2012) useful to obtain a mechanical description of fractional derivative is presented. It is shown that the discretized models are ruled by a set of coupled first order differential equations involving symmetric and positive definite matrices. Modal analysis shows that fractional order operators have a mechanical counterpart that is ruled by a set of Kelvin-Voigt units and each of them provides a proper contribution to the overall response. The robustness of the proposed discretization scheme is assessed in the paper for different classes of external loads and for different values of beta a[0, 1]