Plastic Strain Energy Model for Rock Salt Under Fatigue Loading

The fatigue test for rock salt is conducted to investigate the effects of stress amplitude, loading frequency and loading rate on the plastic strain energy, from which the evaluation rule of the plastic strain energy is analyzed, which is divided into three stages: cyclic hardening, saturation and cyclic softening. The total accumulated plastic strain energy only depends on the mechanical behavior of rock salt, but is immune to the loading conditions. A novel model for fatigue life prediction is proposed based on the invariance of the total plastic dissipation energy and the stability of the plastic energy per cycle.