The paper describes the fundamentals of rock fill collapse and creep and illustrates its relevance through the simulation of the field behavior of a 40m high rock fill embankment.1 INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUNDRecent research on the mechanisms leading to the macroscopic collapse phenomena observed in rockfill has stressed the fundamental effect of Relative Humidity (Alonso & Oldecop, 2000; Oldecop & Alonso, 2001, 2003). Collapse is associated with particle breakage and the velocity of particle breakage in a loaded rockfill depends on the material toughness, the stress intensity and the relative humidity prevailing at the crack tips. A phenomenological model, which incorporates the basic concepts, formulated in terms of hardening plasticity, was proposed by Oldecop & Alonso (2001). The elastoplastic compressibility model, initially developed, relied also on suction controlled testing initially performed on large diameter oedometer cells and later in triaxial chambers (Chávez & Alonso, 2003; Oldecop & Alonso, 2004).
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