“…Thus, if strain softening appears, the dissipative domain will coincide with only one strip of elements through the finite element mesh, but since the dissipation of the total energy is proportional to the size of the finite elements, the energy dissipated would diminish as the elements become smaller upon mesh refinement, leading to non-objective results that depend on the FE size. A solution to this problem, now widely used, has been proposed first in [5], and later on addressed by several authors ( [10,36,40], among others). The authors point out that in a FEM framework, the concept of strain softening should not be considered as a characteristic of the material alone, since it is related to both the fracture energy G f and the size of the finite element where the energy dissipation occurs.…”