Assessing the Power of Intensity Interaction between the Solid and Fluid Phases in the Unconsolidated Water-Saturated Sandy Marine Sediments at Shear Wave Propagation

Abstract

Purpose. Propagation of a shear wave in sandy marine sediments is considered. The acoustic properties of a shear wave are the phase velocity and the attenuation coefficient. It is known that in dry sandy sediments, the attenuation coefficient is directly proportional to frequency. In the saturated mediums, there are the deviations from this law that implies existence of two physical mechanisms of losses – the intergranular friction and viscous loss. The study is aimed at developing a two-phase theoretical model of the shear wave propagation in the unconsolidated marine sediments, and at identifying the dissipative effects caused by the fluid relative movement in the pore space. Methods and Results. The intergranular friction is modeled using a springpot, which represents an element combing conservative properties of a spring and dissipative ones of a dashpot. The equation of motion is applied, where a part of fluid is assumed to be associated with the media solid phase and another part is considered to be mobile. For a harmonic displacement, the equations of state and the equation of motion yield a new two-phase dispersion relation (the theory of Grain Shearing + Effective Density, or GS + EDs, for short). The results of the GS + EDs theory are compared with the data of the velocity and attenuation measurements taken from the open sources. It is shown that during propagation of the compressional and shear waves, the mechanisms of interaction between the granules, and between the granules and fluid are not similar. Character of the changes in the grain-to-grain friction parameters when the pore space is saturated with fluid, is analyzed. Conclusions. Manifestation of the dissipative effects resulting from the pore saturation with fluid depends on the density of the granules packing. In case of a dense packing, there are no conditions for the fluid relative movement, and the sandy sediments exhibit the property of constant Q-factor. If the packing is loose, the viscous losses make a significant contribution, and the attenuation frequency dependence is nonlinear. The effective pore sizes for the compression and shear waves do not coincide.