The debate on whether the creep failure is induced by a stress threshold or a strain threshold is studied on several soils in this paper with a power law model and a normalization curve. The analysis indicates: (a) the creep failure is based on a critical strain, which is obtained with a normalization curve; (b) the time to the creep failure is very long for a low stress level or a low creep exponent; (c) for a given time to the creep failure, the strain threshold could be converted to a stress threshold, and variable stress thresholds will be calculated for different times given to the creep failure; (d) the creep behavior of various materials could be compared with the normalization curve and the power law model.

本文利用幂律模型和归一化曲线研究了几种应力是由应力阈值还是应变阈值引起的蠕变破坏。分析表明：（a）蠕变破坏基于临界应变，该应变是通过归一化曲线获得的；（b）对于低应力水平或低蠕变指数，蠕变破坏的时间很长；（c）对于给定的蠕变破坏时间，可以将应变阈值转换为应力阈值，并在给定蠕变破坏的不同时间计算出可变应力阈值；（d）可以将各种材料的蠕变行为与归一化曲线和幂律模型进行比较。