The dominant causes of irreversible rock deformations are damage process and plastic flow.
Most of the existing elastic–plastic models employed in the analysis and design of rock
structures only consider the plastic flow and ignore the full damage process. The common
plastic models used to simulate the rock failure, does not model the rock realistically and
often the important issues such as stiffness degradation, softening, and significant
differences in rock response under tensile and compressive loadings are ignored …