Mechanical impairment characteristics and a novel constitutive model for rocks subjected to uniaxial loading process

The study of constitutive relationship and damage degradation is crucial in solving the stability challenges faced in the rock engineering. In this work, the stress-strain relationships of different type of rocks subjected to uniaxial loading processes are investigated in details. Experimental results demonstrate measurements, such as uniaxial compressive strength (UCS), tangent deformation modulus, peak strain, and Poisson’s ratio ([Formula: see text]). A novel piecewise constitutive model is proposed that utilizes both a constitutive model during compaction and a conventional damage model using the strain equivalence assumption and logistic growth theory to represent the characteristics of stress-deformation curves during both compaction and post-compaction stages. The performance of the proposed constitutive models in capturing deformation characteristics of damaged rocks is demonstrated to be more outstanding in comparison to existing models. In all experimental cases discussed in this study, the proposed model outperforms existing reference models in terms of the coefficients of determination ([Formula: see text]), with the former having coefficients of determination greater than 0.95. Furthermore, physical meanings of relevant model parameters are found to be closely associated with properties of experimental stress-strain curves.