An elasto-viscoplastic model for soft rock around tunnels considering overconsolidation and structure effects

When evaluating the long-term stability of existing tunnels, the creep behavior of soft rock around the tunnel should be properly considered. It is also important to understand the failure mechanism of soft rock when designing the mitigation and remediation of the failure around a tunnel. In this paper, an elasto-viscoplastic model is first modified so that the overconsolidation effect and the structure effect of soft rock can be considered. Then, the performance of the modified model is confirmed with drained triaxial compression tests and creep tests on a manmade rock produced with gypsum and diatom clay. Based on the modified model, finite element analyses are conducted to simulate the model tests of an existing tunnel constructed within manmade rock. Two kinds of model tests are simulated: one is loading failure test and the other creep failure test. The good agreement between the numerical results and the test data validates the performance of the modified constitutive model and the applicability of the corresponding FEM for evaluating the creep failure behavior of an existed tunnel constructed in soft rock.