Theoretical Simulation of Experimental Observations of Surface Wave Propagation on a Fluid-Saturated Porous Material

Abstract

Wave propagation in fluid-saturated porous materials presents very particular features like the appearance of a second compressional wave, the so-called slow compressional wave, in addition to the conventional P (or fast compressional) and the shear wave [1,2]. First experimental observation of the slow compressional wave was carried out by Plona in 1980 in water-saturated porous ceramics at ultrasonic frequencies [3]. In 1983 Feng and Johnson predicted the existence of a new surface mode along a fluid/fluid-saturated porous solid interface, in addition to the well-known leaky-Rayleigh and true Stoneley modes [4,5]. Feng and Johnson introduced the so-called surface stiffness, T, as a parameter which describes the boundary conditions at the interface. For a value of T=0 the pores at the surface are considered open, whereas for a value of T=∞ they are considered to be closed. However, according to the theory this new surface mode appears only when closed pores boundary conditions prevail at the interface. This last restriction renders the observation of the new mode problematic, because the extreme difficult in closing the surface pores without clogging all the pores close to the surface (e.g. by painting). In 1992 Nagy observed experimental evidence of the slow surface wave [6]. Nagy demonstrated that capillary forces can extend an ideally thin membrane over the surface pores at the interface between a porous solid saturated with a wetting fluid (e.g. water or alcohol) and a non-wetting fluid (e.g. air). Under this conditions, experimental evidence of a simple form of the new surface wave mode predicted by Feng and Johnson during alcohol saturation of a sintered glass beads specimen was obtained. However, due to problems inherent to the excitation of surface waves in fluid-saturated porous solids (e.g. extremely high attenuation, small propagation lengths, etc.) the results were not conclusive. In this work we will show that the experimental evidence of slow surface wave can be predicted by the analytical method of Feng and Johnson [5], if slight modifications are introduced into the calculation technique in order to account for some of the particular characteristics of the experiment.