A study of the dissipative behavior of geomaterials undergoing large deformations

Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, College Station TX

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract 9987677 The understanding of the response of geomaterials such as soils and rocks is crucial in addressing a variety of problems in geotechnical engineering, environmental engineering, transportation, building and construction technology. Attempts to describe the response of such materials are adaptations of classical plasticity and mixture theory. Recently, a general framework has been developed to study a diverse class of dissipative processes such as slip, twinning, phase transition, and damage in polymer networks. The objective of this award is to generalize the theory further to include the dissipative response of geomaterials. The main features of the theory are: it takes into account the fact that many materials can exist in more than one natural configuration and that, at a given instant, the response is determined by the deformation gradient from all these configurations, giving the material its mixture-like characteristics; when these materials undergo dissipative processes, the underlying natural configurations invariably change; the evolution of the natural configurations is determined in general by a thermodynamic criterion; the material has various means of storing energy; different types of response can be activated if certain thermodynamic criteria are met; and once a particular mechanism is activated, it might be necessary to prescribe the evolution for the mechanism.