“…Upon material softening, a severe mesh dependence is experienced whether these equations were to be solved through Finite Element Modeling (FEM) [15,11,51]. On top of that, an accurate, thermodynamically-consistent material description must be employed to correctly capture the thermal softening induced by high plastic deformation [2,32,13,53,40]. Furthermore, the fact that during these processes the deformation is prone to localize in narrow areas makes it necessary to adopt numerical models which are able to predict size-effects [17,21,56,28,54,35,39,42,48].…”