An Engineering Theory of Creep of Frozen Soils

Most of the existing theories of creep have been developed from two different viewpoints: micromechanistic and macroanalytical. The former deal with events occurring at the atomic level and provide knowledge of the processes that control creep. The latter are based on certain macroscopic experimental findings and represent, in fact, an extension of the theory of plasticity to include time and ltemperature effects. Both the micromechanistic and macroanalytical approaches lead to fruitful resuts and each can benefit from the other. However, although the former has the advantage of being derived from physical concepts, the use of the latter is often preferred in practice if it provides basic relations that are broad in scope and can lead to improved procedures for designing structures.In this paper, a macroanalytical view of the problem of creep of frozen soils is presented. The proposed theory of creep has been developed mainly with the purpose of being used as a basis for solving a specific soil engineering problem, i.e., the bearing capacity of buried footings and anchors.Since the problem is itself rather complex, it was endeavoured to present the creep information in a relatively simple mathematical form. The theory, while using certain concepts and data from the frozen soils literature, follows more closely, nevertheless, the methods usual in certain engineering theories of creep of metals.