An elasto-viscoplastic constitutive model with strain-softening for soft sedimentary rocks

In general, soft sedimentary rocks exhibit strain-softening and time-dependent behavior. In the present paper, an elasto-viscoplastic constitutive model for soft rocks is proposed, that can universally describe time-dependent behavior such as creep, stress relaxation and strain rate sensitivity by extending Adachi and Oka's elasto-viscoplastic model for frozen sand. It is found that the proposed model can be applied to the time-dependent behavior of a soft tuffaceous rock called Tomuro Stone under the strain rate constant triaxial compression, drained triaxial creep and undrained triaxial stress relaxation.