Formulation of non-coaxial plastic dissipation and stress–dilatancy relations for geomaterials

Stress–dilatancy theories play a central role in the modeling of the plastic dissipation of geomaterials. There exist several mathematical frameworks for describing the stress–dilatancy behavior of soils. One of the limiting assumptions often introduced is coaxiality between principal directions of stresses and plastic strain increments. However, experimental evidences suggest that this assumption is generally invalid for the deformation behavior of granular materials. In this paper, non-coaxial stress–dilatancy framework is developed first in axis symmetric, plane strain and then for general stress–strain conditions. To facilitate the use of the stress–dilatancy framework for cyclic loading conditions, loading and unloading are explicitly considered in the development of the framework. Furthermore, a possible way of establishing the evolution of the degree of non-coaxiality in plane strain and axis symmetric cases is presented. Then the approach is applied to selected yield functions