Viscoelasto-plastic rheological experiment under circular increment step load and unload and nonlinear creep model of soft rocks

The viscoelastic-plastic creep experiments on soft ore-rock in Jinchuan Mine. were performed under circular increment step load and unload. The experimental data were analyzed according to instantaneous elastic strain, visco-elastic strain, instantaneous plastic strain and visco-plastic strain. The result shows that instantaneous deformation modulus tends to increase with the increase of creep stress; soft rocks enhance the ability to resist instantaneous elastic deformation and instantaneous plastic deformation during the multi-level of load and unload in the cyclic process. In respect of specimen JC1099, the ratio of visco-elastic strain to visco-plastic strain varies from 3.15 to 6.58, and the ratio has decreasing tendency with stress increase as a whole; creep deformation tends to be a steady state at low stress level; soft rocks creep usually embodies accelerated creep properties at high stress level. With the damaging variable and the hardening function introduced, a nonlinear creep model of soft rocks is established, in which the decay creep is described by the nonlinear hardening function H of viscidity coefficient. The model can describe the accelerated creep of soft rocks since the nonlinear damaging evolvement variable D of deformation parameter of rocks is introduced. Three stages of soft rocks creep can be described with the uniform creep equation in the nonlinear creep model. With this nonlinear creep model applied to the creep experiments of the ore-rock of Jinchuan Mine., the nonlinear creep model's curves are in good agreement with experimental data.