Equations and fundamental characteristics of transverse waves propagating in fluid-saturated porous materials

Abstract

The main purpose of the paper is to present an extended analysis of the coupled system of linear equations describing wave propagation in fluid-saturated porous materials used for the determination of their fundamental characteristics. The present paper is the first part, mainly devoted to the analysis of the system of equations describing transverse wave propagation. The analysis of equations for compressional waves will be presented in a separate paper. The starting point of considerations are nonlinear equations describing the dynamic behavior of the medium formulated in the spirit of the theory of interacting continua in which parameters of isotropic pore space structure are explicitly present in the model, and constitutive equations are formulated for each physical component separately. They contain all fundamental mechanical couplings between components of this medium in the general nonlinear form and of clear physical meaning. Linear equations of this theory for barotropic fluid and hyperelastic skeleton are the subject of the analysis performed in the paper. They are equivalent to Biot's model, widely used in the description and analysis of wave propagation in saturated porous materials and wave interaction with the boundary of such media. A new method of analysis is proposed in the paper, based on spectral decomposition of the system of equations in the two-dimensional vector space of rotations of solid and fluid particles. It is shown that each choice of the base in this vector space defines the division of the medium into two new components and transforms the system of equation to the form describing the dynamic behavior of these components, and the requirement of the basic dynamic properties of the medium to be invariant in each chosen base uniquely determines the mass densities and bulk modules of the new components. Such an approach enabled decomposition of the system of equations for particle rotations to two uncoupled scalar equations, the only one of which describes propagation of the transverse wave. This also allowed obtaining expressions characterizing transverse wave propagation in fluid-saturated porous materials: velocity, effective mass densities and wave impedance of the medium associated with this wave and its frequency characteristics: phase velocity and attenuation coefficient. It is shown that both frequency characteristics are fully defined by the effective mass densities of both components associated with the transverse wave, the tortuosity of the pore space, and the coefficient characterizing the viscous interaction of the fluid with the skeleton.