A constitutive law for rock salt based on creep and relaxation tests

Summary The paper deals with uniaxial relaxation tests on rock salt which are the basis for a constitutive equation. Since so far no regard was paid to relaxation behaviour, corresponding test results are not available and hence a special device for performing of uniaxial relaxation tests had to be constructed. Some interesting test results are discussed in the paper. These results are useful for the verification of constitutive equations. A critical analysis of conventional constitutive laws and their fundamentals shows that these material laws have considerable imperfections and are rested on substantial restrictions. Particularly, they are not able to describe relaxation behaviour sufficiently. Consequently, a constitutive law is proposed consisting of a strain hardening approach with separate creep and relaxation functions. By post-calculation of different laboratory tests it could be shown that in comparison to conventional steady-state creep equations this material law describes the viscous behaviour of rock salt more realistically.