ABSTRACT

A better understanding of the stress-strain-time behaviour of geomaterials … will become of little benefit to our discipline if not accomplished by some useful tasks such as: (a) framing these concepts within a new generation of constitutive models, (b) implementing the constitutive models in computer codes operating in a user-friendly manner and able to solve the boundary value problem of practical interest, and (c) checking the results obtained by means of the above numerical modelling against well-documented case histories to verify coincidences and diversities between the behaviour observed in the field and that computed on the basis of laboratory (and field) measurements.