On Elastoplastic Damage Modelling in Unsaturated Geomaterials

In the context of nuclearwaste disposal, the modelling of the behaviour of host rocks and soils still needs improvement.Unsaturated porous geomaterials exhibit particular behaviourwhen exposed to suction. Their non-linear behaviour may result fromtwo different processes, plasticity which induces irreversible strains and damage which causes a deterioration of their elastic properties. Many elasto-plastic models are now available for unsaturated soils, most of them based on the Barcelona Basic Model (Alonso et al., 1990). They take into consideration a certain number of issues linkedwith the nature of unsatured soils.Models coupling damage and plasticity have also been proposed for continuous media. Since very few works have attempted to connect these two distinct fields, unsaturated soil mechanics and continuum damage mechanics, thiswork focuses on themain issues related to the development of amodel coupling elasto-plasticity and damage for unsaturated porous media.