Micromechanical modelling of the anisotropic creep behaviour of granular medium as a fourth-order fabric tensor

The main objective of the present work is to develop a micromechanics approach to predict the macroscopic anisotropic creep behaviour of granular media. To this end, the linear viscoelastic behaviour of the inter-particle interaction at contact is adopted, and the contact distribution is characterized by a fourth-order fabric tensor in the local scale. Then, fourth-order tensor fabric-based micromechanical approaches based on Voigt and Reuss localization assumptions are applied to granular media in the Laplace–Carson space. With help of the inverse Laplace–Carson transformation of these obtained models, the macroscopic anisotropic creep behaviour of granular media submitted to a constant external loading is examined. Finally, the obtained results by specializing the Burgers model into the obtained models are compared with the numerical simulations in the particle flow code (PFC2D) to illustrate the validation and the accuracy of the analytical models for the macroscopic anisotropic creep behaviour of granular media.