Symmetric Element Stiffness and Symplectic Integration for Eringen’s Integral Nonlocal Rods: Static Response and Higher-Order Vibrations

Integral-form nonlocal elasticity provides a mechanically meaningful approach to describing size effects, yet it leads to Volterra-type integro-differential equations that are difficult to solve analytically and numerically challenging for boundary layers and high-order modes. In this work, we developed a symplectic numerical integration framework for Eringen’s two-phase (local/nonlocal mixture) integral model by embedding the constitutive operator into a Hamiltonian formulation and discretizing the influence domain in a belt-wise manner. A step-increase strategy was incorporated to allow flexible spatial marching while preserving the geometric (symplectic) structure of the transfer operation. In addition, a symmetry-explicit, element-level stiffness representation was derived for the discretized integral operator; it exposes a mirrored long-range coupling pattern and enables symmetric, energy-consistent assembly. The resulting kernel-agnostic algorithm accommodates both smooth and finite-range kernels. Static benchmarks and longitudinal vibrations are investigated for exponential, Gaussian, and triangular kernels over representative length ratios and mixture parameters. Comparisons with available analytical and asymptotic solutions show good agreement within their validity ranges, and the method yields stable higher-order eigenfrequencies when asymptotic expansions may be unreliable. The current study is limited to a linear one-dimensional rod setting, and validation is restricted to published analytical/asymptotic solutions rather than experimental calibration.