Squirt-flow seismic dispersion models: a comparison

Abstract

SUMMARY The anelastic properties of porous rocks depend on the pore characteristics, specifically, the pore aspect ratio and the pore fraction (related to the soft porosity). At high frequencies, there is no fluid pressure communication throughout the pore space and the rock becomes stiffer than at low frequencies, where the pore pressure is fully equilibrated. This causes a significant difference between the moduli at low and high frequencies, which is known as seismic dispersion and is commonly explained by the squirt-flow mechanism. In this paper, we consider and contrast three squirt-flow dispersion models: the modified Mavko–Jizba model, valid for a porous medium with arbitrary shapes of the pores and cracks, and two other models, based on idealized geometries of spheres and ellipsoids: the EIAS (equivalent inclusion-average stress) and CPEM (cracks and pores effective medium) models. We first perform analytical comparisons and then compute several numerical examples to demonstrate similarities and differences between the models. The analytical comparison shows that when the stiff pores are spherical and the crack density is small, the theoretical predictions of the three models are very close to each other. However, when the stiff pores are spheroids with an aspect ratio smaller than 1 (say, between 0.2 and 1), the predictions of inclusion based models are not valid at frequencies of ultrasonic measurements on rock samples. In contrast, the predictions of the modified Mavko–Jizba model are valid at ultrasonic frequencies of about 106 Hz, which is a typical frequency of laboratory measurements on core samples. We also introduce Zener-based bulk and shear dispersion indices, which are proportional to the difference between the high- and low-frequency stiffness moduli, and are a measure of the degree of anelasticity, closely related to the quality factors by view of the Kramers–Kronig relations. The results show that the three models yield similar moduli dispersion with very small differences when the crack density is relatively high. The indices versus crack density can be viewed as a template to obtain the crack properties from low- and high-frequency velocity measurements.