SUMMARYThe mechanical behaviour of bonded geomaterials is described by means of an elastoplastic strainhardening model. The internal variables, taking into account the 'history' of the material, depend on the plastic strains experienced and on a conveniently defined scalar measure of damage induced by weathering and/or chemical degradation.For the sake of simplicity, it is assumed that only internal variables are affected by mechanical and chemical history of the material. Despite this simplifying assumption, it can be shown that many interesting phenomena exhibited by weathered bonded geomaterials can be successfully described. For instance, (i) the transition from brittle to ductile behaviour with increasing pressure of a calcarenite with collapsing internal structure, (ii) the complex behaviour of chalk and other calcareous materials in oedometric tests, (iii) the chemically induced variation of the stress and strain state of such kind of materials, are all phenomena that can be qualitatively reproduced. Several comparisons with experimental data show that the model can capture the observed behaviour also quantitatively.

SUMMARYAn extended version of the classical Generalized Backward Euler (GBE) algorithm is proposed for the numerical integration of a three-invariant isotropic-hardening elastoplastic model for cemented soils or weak rocks undergoing mechanical and non-mechanical degradation processes. The restriction to isotropy allows to formulate the return mapping algorithm in the space of principal elastic strains. In this way, an efficient and robust integration scheme is developed which can be applied to relatively complex yield surface and plastic potential functions. Moreover, the proposed algorithm can be linearized in closed form, thus allowing for quadratic convergence in the global Newton iteration. A series of numerical experiments are performed to illustrate the accuracy and convergence properties of the algorithm. Selected results from a finite element analysis of a circular footing on a soft rock layer undergoing chemical weathering are then presented to illustrate the algorithm performance at the boundary value problem level.

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