BEYOND FAILURE IN GRANULAR MATERIALS

Recent investigations on the hypoplastic constitutive model for granular materials show that the failure surface can be surpassed by some stress paths. This is contradictory to the conventional definition of failure surface in plasticity, according to which the stress is allowed to move on the failure surface but never across it. In the present paper, the interrelations among the different constitutive models are discussed with special reference to failure and stability. For the hypoplastic constitutive equation, the accessible stress states and the stable stress states are found to be enclosed by a bound surface and a stability surface in the stress space, respectively. Theoretical findings about the bound surface and the stability surface are verified qualitatively by presenting results of triaxial tests on dry sand. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.