  I adapted a model recently introduced in the context of seismic phenomena, to
study creep rupture of materials. It consists of linear elastic fibers that
interact in an equal load sharing scheme, complemented with a local
viscoelastic relaxation mechanism. The model correctly describes the three
stages of the creep process, namely an initial Andrade regime of creep
relaxation, an intermediate regime of rather constant creep rate, and a
tertiary regime of accelerated creep towards final failure of the sample. In
the tertiary regime creep rate follows the experimentally observed one over
time-to-failure dependence. The time of minimum strain rate is systematically
observed to be about 60-65 % of the time to failure, in accordance with
experimental observations. In addition, burst size statistics of breaking
events display a -3/2 power law for events close to the time of failure, and a
steeper decay for the all-time distribution. Statistics of interevent times
shows a tendency of the events to cluster temporarily. This behavior should be
observable in acoustic emission experiments.
