Enhanced Peat Creep Model - User Manual and Documentation

A constitutive model is proposed to capture the complex behavior of peat-like materials, based on the principles of hyperplasticity. The high degree of compressibility observed in fibrous peat is due largely to its extremely high water content and solid structure comprised of compressible, hollow, elongated fibres, making both the composition and mechanical behavior of peat significantly different from that of typical clays or sands. The hyperplastic framework is based on the formulation of two energy functions that describe the evolution and dissipation of energy in a system: the Gibbs free energy function and the dissipative energy function. The constitutive relationships for peat-like materials are derived from the proposed energy functions. Undrained triaxial tests on peat were simulated, and the results compared to results from actual tests to validate to model. A controlled rate of strain (CRS) test was also simulated at different strain rates.