A constitutive theory for creep behavior of initially isotropic materials sustaining unilateral damage

The goal of the present work is to modify structure of the creep constitutive equations existing in the literature, and simultaneously to incorporate both damage induced anisotropy and unilateral damage into the constitutive model. The proposed nonlinear-tensor constitutive equation for creep together with the damage evolution equation take into account the secondary and tertiary creep of the initially isotropic materials. The material parameters of the model are determined using basic experiments. It is shown that the creep model is capable of describing available experimental data for the lateral creep responses under uniaxial compression. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.