The creep behaviors in deep underground engineering structures, especially in soft rocks, have a remarkable impact on the long-term stability of the excavations, which finally leads to the high risk and failure of it. Accordingly, it is essential to recognize the time-dependent deformation through the investigation of this phenomenon. In this study, the creep behaviors of soft rocks have been widely examined to help understand the underlying mechanism of the extended time-dependent deformation. Due to the limited results about the time-dependent properties of the constituents of the rock that reveal their heterogeneity, the targeting nanoindentation technique (TNIT), was adopted to investigate the viscoelastic characteristics of kaolinite and quartz in a two-constituent mudstone sample. The TNIT consists of identifications of mineralogical ingredients in mudstone with nanoindentation experiments on each identified constituent. After conducting experiments, the unloading stages of the typical indentation curves were analyzed to calculate the hardness and elastic modulus of both elements in mudstone. Additionally, the 180 s load-holding stages with the peak load of 50 mN were transformed into the typical creep strain-time curves for fitting analysis by using the Kelvin model, the standard viscoelastic model, and the extended viscoelastic model. Fitting results show that the standard viscoelastic model not only can perfectly express the nanoindentation creep behaviors of both kaolinite and quartz but also can produce suitable constants used to measure their creep parameters. Furthermore, the creep parameters of kaolinite are much smaller than that of quartz, which causes the considerable time-dependent deformation of the soft mudstone. Eventually, the standard viscoelastic model was also verified on the quartz in a sandstone sample.

In deep underground engineering, the creep behaviors of soft rocks have been widely investigated to help understand the mechanism of the time-dependent large deformation and failure of underground engineering structures. However, rocks were used to be regarded as homogeneous materials and there are limited studying results about the time-dependent properties of constituents in them to reveal their creep mechanism. In this context, the targeting nanoindentation technique (TNIT) was adopted to investigate the viscoelastic characteristics of kaolinite and quartz in a two-constituent mudstone sample. The TNIT consists of identifications of mineralogical constituents in mudstone and nanoindentation experiments on identified constituents. After conducting experiments, the unloading stages of the typical indentation curves were analyzed to calculate the hardness and elastic modulus of constituents in mudstone. And the 180 s load-holding stages with the maximum load of 50 mN were transformed to the typical creep strain-time curves for fitting analysis by using the Kelvin model, the standard viscoelastic model and the extended viscoelastic model. Fitting results show that the standard viscoelastic model can perfectly express the nanoindentation creep behaviors of both kaolinite and quartz and fitting constants are suitable to be used to calculate their creep parameters. The creep parameters of kaolinite are much smaller than that of quartz, which drives the time-dependent large deformation of the soft mudstone. At last, the standard viscoelastic model was verified on a sandstone sample.