Micro–macro approach of salt viscous fatigue under cyclic loading

•Salt rock fatigue induced by cyclic loading is modeled by upscaling grain viscoplastic deformation and breakage.•A failure criterion is introduced in a self-consistent homogenization scheme initially proposed for visco-plastic materials.•The model captures strain hardening, creep recovery, damage and accelerated creep due to grain breakage.•Incremental viscoplastic strains decrease over the loading cycles, which is in agreement with the phenomenon of “shakedown”.