A new combined isotropic-kinematic hardening rule is proposed based on the concept of the generalized homological center and the generalization of Masing's rule. The key point of the new hardening rule is that the unloading event can be treated as if it were virgin loading through taking the stress reversal point as the new generalized homological center of the bounding surface. Therefore, a new simple bounding-surface plasticity model with three important features for the cyclic behaviors of saturated clay is developed. Firstly, according to the movement of the generalized homological center, the model can harden not only isotropically but also kinematically to account for the anisotropy and memory the particular loading events. Secondly, the continuous cyclic loading is divided into the first loading, unloading and reloading processes and they are treated differently when calculating the hardening modulus to describe the soil responses accurately. The third feature is taking the generalized homological center as the mapping origin in the mapping rule to reflect the plastic flow in the unloading event. The behaviors of saturated clay for the monotonic and cyclic stress-controlled and strain-controlled triaxial tests are simulated by the model. The prediction results show an encouraging agreement with the experimental data.

Financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51309213, 51179124 and 50979070) is gratefully acknowledged. The first author would also like to thank Professor T. Li in Beijing Jiaotong University of China for his generous help with this research.