A viscoplastic subloading soil model for rate‐dependent cyclic anisotropic structured behaviour

Summary This paper presents a new purely viscoplastic soil model based on the subloading surface concept with a mobile centre of homothety, enabling the occurrence of viscoplastic strains inside the yield surface and avoiding the abrupt change in stiffness of the traditional overstress viscoplastic models. This is required for overconsolidated soils. The model is formulated to reproduce the soil rate‐dependent behaviour under cyclic loading (changes in loading direction) and incorporates both initial and induced anisotropy, as well as destructuring. The model shows good qualitative response to some imposed three‐dimensional stress paths under quasi‐inviscid (elastoplastic) behaviour. Some of the main time‐dependent aspects of soil behaviour that the model is capable of reproducing were also illustrated. The capability of the model to adequately reproduce the results from an undrained triaxial test performed on stiff overconsolidated clays from the Lisbon region ( Formação de Benfica ), with an unloading–reloading deviatoric stress cycle at constant mean stress, that incorporates a series of staggered fast loading and creep stages, was evaluated. The model was able to reproduce well the main observed aspects of the time‐dependent stress–strain response and pore pressure evolution of a stiff overconsolidated clay under complex loading. The revised and generalised viscoplastic subloading surface concept is viable and can be applied to a consistent extension to viscoplasticity, including in the interior of the yield surface, of existing elastoplastic models formulated for soils and other materials. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.