Compressible Porous Media: Toward a General Theory

Abstract

The porous media theory with incompressible constituents had already come to well founded conclusions in the early stage of its development (see Fillunger, 1936). This concerns, in particular, the discovery of the effective stress principle that states, that the stress state in a saturated porous solid can be additively decomposed into a weighted pore pressure and a stress which is governed by the motion of the skeleton. This principle was formulated by von Terzaghi (1936), although the first theoretical and experimental proofs were carried out by Fillunger (1913, 1914, 1915) (see also de Boer and Ehlers, 1990). With the revival of the porous media theory in the 1970’s and 1980’s Bowen (1980) constructed a general porous media theory including thermal effects, with incompressible constituents, using mixture theory restricted by the volume fraction concept. Its main results are consistent with the current point of view.