# Study on Creep Behavior of Silty Clay Based on Fractal Derivative
[20] described the time-dependent behavior of Shanghai marine clay through the improved fractional merchant model. However, compared with the integer derivative model, the development of global operators through convolution integration of fractional derivatives requires higher computing costs and memory requirements [27]. Therefore, the fractal theory, which evolved from the fractional theory, gradually developed because of its local operator without convolution integrals [27]. Compared with fractional derivative theory, fractal derivative theory can provide a higher calculation efficiency and fitting accuracy under the same number of parameters, which have been applied and promoted in many engineering fields [28; 29; 30], and gradually began to be applied in geotechnical engineering to characterize the rheological behavior of rock and soil materials. [PERSON] et al. [27] first proposed the fractal Maxwell model and the fractal Kelvin model and confirmed the proposed fractal model could characterize the creep behavior of viscoelastic frozen soil. [PERSON] et al. [31] applied [PERSON]'s fractal derivative to establish the fractal Bingham model to describe the viscoelastic deformation characteristics and verified the accuracy of the proposed fractal model by fitting the relevant rheological test data. [PERSON] et al. [32] proposed a time fractal derivative constitutive model to describe the whole creep region of granite by replacing the Newton dashpot with a fractal dashpot. [PERSON] et al. [33] introduced an unsteady fractal derivative creep model to describe a soft interlayer's complete creep failure process. [PERSON] et al. [34] proposed a fractal derivative viscoelastic and viscoplastic constitutive model with isotropic damage to describe the creep mechanism and mean deformation in squeezing ground reasonably well. [PERSON] et al. [35] suggested a fractal merchant model that characterizes the creep behavior of marine-terrestrial deposit soil, which obtained satisfactory results, demonstrating that the fractal derivative theory is appropriate to describe the creep characteristics of the soil. Figure 2: The geological condition of the south anchorage foundation. In general, the fractal derivative theory has been verified in several fields with high computational efficiency and the ability to characterize the creep of materials. However, there have been few reports on the fractal derivative creep model of geotechnical materials at present. It is not clear whether the fractal derivative creep model can be used to characterize the creep characteristics of silty clay in riverside areas of south China. Based on the above considerations, a triaxial drainage creep test was carried out to study the creep characteristics of the undisturbed silty clay samples along the Yangtze River in Jiangsu Province. By introducing fractal derivative theory, an improved fractal derivative Burgers model is proposed to describe the creep behavior of silty clay with fewer parameters and higher accuracy. The research results can be used to predict the displacement of the foundation and formulate measures to control the deformation, which provide a reference value for the creep characteristics of riverside soft soil in southern China.