Elastic moduli’s relation to microstructure properties in porous media using GSA modeling

Abstract

Summary It’s well known that microstructure plays a significant role in determining the overall effective elastic and conductive properties of a porous medium. With the help of one accurate effective medium modeling method General Singular Approximation (GSA), we can numerically obtain the effective elastic and conductive properties with known mineral composition, elastic/conductive properties of all components and microstructure properties (Bayuk and Chesnokov, 1998; Bayuk and Rodkin, 1999; Bayuk et al, 2007; Chesnokov et al, 2009). In a general porous medium, microstructure properties mainly include independent parameters such as porosity, aspect ratio, connectivity. Given aspect ratio, porosity and crack density are interchangeable, so that we can also use crack density instead of porosity. GSA is one unique method in a sense that it can take into account all the 3 parameters, especially connectivity, which is included in GSA by introducing one empirical parameter called friability, but is missing from most of other effective medium models (Eshelby, 1957; Hudson, 1981; Nishizawa, 1982). The explicit relation between elastic moduli and microstructure will enhance our understanding and prediction the change of one from that of the other, or vice versa. It also can give us information of how sensitive the elastic moduli are due to each of microstructure parameters.