Inelastic homogenization stops solving a unit cell at every point: internal-variable dimension grows only logarithmically with error and material contrast
The macroscopic constitutive law of an inelastic heterogeneous material depends on both loading history and microstructure, and computational homogenization must repeatedly solve a unit-cell problem at every macroscopic quadrature point. For Kelvin–Voigt viscoelasticity, a recurrent neural operator model takes the microstructure as input, and it is proved to approximate the homogenized constitutive law uniformly in time; the sufficient internal-variable dimension grows logarithmically with the inverse relative stress error and with each material contrast. Crystal-plasticity experiments show accuracy improving and then plateauing as that dimension grows.