Modelling creep behavior of soft clay by incorporating updated volumetric and deviatoric strain-time equations

Soft clay is widely spread in nature and encountered in geotechnical engineering applications. The creep property of soft clay greatly affects the long-term performance of its upper structures. Therefore, it is vital to establish a reasonable and practical creep constitutive model. In the study, two updated hyperbolic equations based on the volumetric creep and deviatoric creep are respectively proposed. Subsequently, three creep constitutive models based on different creep behavior, i.e., V-model (use volumetric creep equation), D-model (use deviatoric creep equation) and VD-model (use both volumetric and deviatoric creep equations) are developed and compared. From the aspect of prediction accuracy, both V-model and D-model show good agreements with experimental results, while the predictions of the VD-model are smaller than the experimental results. In terms of the parametric sensitivity, D-model and VD-model are lower sensitive to parameter M (the slope of the critical state line) than V-model. Therefore, the D-model which is developed by incorporating the updated deviatoric creep equation is suggested in engineering applications.