Micromechanical analysis of imperfectly bonded layered media

The flexible interface model is adopted in this paper to analyze the three-dimensional (3D) elastic constitutive relationships, together with the local stress and strain distributions within constituent layers of an imperfectly bonded multilayered medium. Each constituent layer is assumed to be generally anisotropic with 21 independent elastic moduli, and three damage parameters are used to model the imperfect bonding state of each interface. Due to the generality of this model, elastic constitutive relationships for layered media composed of layers of other kinds of elastic symmetry can be readily achieved by algebraic reductions. From the comparison between theoretical predictions and experimental results on artificial bilaminated rock masses composed of isotropic layers, this model is shown to be a reasonable substitute of the conventional perfect bonding constitutive model.