Abstract: In this article, an energy based practical elastic plastic damage constitutive model is established. The effective stress space concept is adopted which can decouple the damage and plastic processes. Empirical formula is used to determine the plastic deformations in effective stress space which can improve the calculation efficiency. Within a framework of irreversible thermodynamics, the damage criteria are based on elastic damage energy release rate which is derived from the modified elastic Helmholtz free energy. In order to improve the accuracy of the model under biaxial loading, the Helmholtz free energy is decomposed into hydrostatic and deviatoric stress components in which the damage evolution produced by hydrostatic stress component is neglected. Thus, the calculation’s efficiency is improved to be free of iteration and the deviatoric stress component is amended according to stress state. The stress tensor is spectral decomposed into tensile and compressive components in order to reflect different damage evolutions, and a tensile and a compressive damage variables are used to simulate different responses of the concrete under tension and compression. Finally,the proposed model is validated by several numerical simulations.