Thermoelastic response of fluid‐saturated porous rock

Abstract

A linear theory for fluid‐saturated, porous, thermoelastic media is developed. The theory allows for compressibility and thermal expansion of both the fluid and solid constituents. A general solution scheme is presented, in which a diffusion equation with a temperature‐dependent source term governs a combination of the mean total stress and the fluid pore pressure. In certain special cases, this reduces to a diffusion equation for the pressure alone. In addition, when convective heat transfer and thermoelastic coupling can be neglected, the temperature field can be determined independently, and the source term in the pressure equation is known. Drained and undrained limits are identified, in which fluid flow plays no role in the deformation. In the drained case, the medium behaves as a simple thermoelastic body with the properties of the porous skeleton with no fluid present. In the undrained limit, the fluid is trapped in the pores, and the material responds as a thermoelastic body with effective compressibility and thermal expansivity determined in part by the fluid properties. The theory is further specialized to one‐dimensional deformation, and several illustrative problems are solved. In particular, the heating of a half space is explored for constant temperature and constant flux boundary conditions on the thermal field, and for drained (zero pressure) and impermeable (zero flux) conditions on the fluid pressure field. The behavior of these solutions depends critically upon the ratio of the fluid and thermal diffusivities, with very large and very small values of this parameter corresponding to drained and undrained responses, respectively.