Non-coaxial Plasticity Constitutive Modeling of Sands

Classical coaxial plasticity constitutive models implicate an inevitable limitation that directions for principal stress and that for principal plastic strain increment are always coaxial. They are not capable of simulating non-coaxial phenomena during the rotation of principal stress axis. In this paper, a three-dimensional, non-coaxial plasticity constitutive model for sands with a modification of Lade angle dependent shape function is introduced to describe the non-coaxial behavior under principal axes rotation. A series of numerical simulations of hollow cylindrical torsional shear tests are performed. The results show that the proposed constitutive model can predict the variations of principal plastic strain increment directions with principal stress directions reasonably.