Dynamic transverse shear modulus for a heterogeneous fluid-filled porous solid containing cylindrical inclusions

Abstract

An exact analytical solution is presented for the effective dynamic transverse shear modulus in a heterogeneous fluid-filled porous solid containing cylindrical inclusions. The complex and frequency-dependent properties of the dynamic shear modulus are caused by the physical mechanism of mesoscopic-scale wave-induced fluid flow whose scale is smaller than wavelength but larger than the size of pores. Our model consists of three phases: a long cylindrical inclusion, a cylindrical shell of poroelastic matrix material with different mechanical and/or hydraulic properties than the inclusion and an outer region of effective homogeneous medium of laterally infinite extent. The behavior of both the inclusion and the matrix is described by Biot's consolidation equations, whereas the surrounding effective medium which is used to describe the effective transverse shear properties of the inner poroelastic composite is assumed to be a viscoelastic solid whose complex transverse shear modulus needs to be determined. The determined effective transverse shear modulus is used to quantify the S-wave attenuation and velocity dispersion in heterogeneous fluid-filled poroelastic rocks. The calculation shows the relaxation frequency and relative position of various fluid saturation dispersion curves predicted by this study exhibit very good agreement with those of a previous 2-D finite-element simulation. For the double-porosity model (inclusions having a different solid frame than the matrix but the same pore fluid as the matrix) the effective shear modulus also exhibits a size-dependent characteristic that the relaxation frequency moves to lower frequencies by two orders of magnitude if the radius of the cylindrical poroelastic composite increases by one order of magnitude. For the patchy-saturation model (inclusions having the same solid frame as the matrix but with a different pore fluid from the matrix), the heterogeneity in pore fluid cannot cause any attenuation in the transverse shear modulus at all. A comparison with the case of spherical inclusions illustrates that the transverse shear modulus for the cylindrical inclusion exhibits more S-wave attenuation than spherical inclusions.