Experimental Study of Seismic Wave Attenuation in Carbonate Rocks

Seismic wave attenuation has a great potential for studying saturated and fractured media, due to its high sensitivity to the physical properties of geological media. However, accurately estimating this parameter can be challenging due to its sensitivity to signal noise, particularly in heterogeneous media such as carbonate rocks. This explains the paucity of attenuation studies carried out in carbonate rocks compared with sandstones, and the ambiguity around its mechanisms and its relationship with petrophysical properties. To investigate further, we conducted an experimental study of ultrasonic waveform signals (0.5–3 MHz) reordered under dry and fully saturation conditions in 13 samples covering a wide range of petrophysical values and subjected them to differential pressure reaching reservoir pressure. The resulting increase in attenuation magnitudes and their variation with pressure due to brine saturation were more pronounced than in velocity magnitudes, confirming the higher sensitivity of attenuation to fluid content. However, understanding the relationship between attenuation and petrophysical properties required a careful examination of the results and more elucidation about attenuation mechanisms. We suggested that multiple attenuation mechanisms coexist, including scattering, cracks slipping, solid frictional relative motion, and global and squirt flow. This explains the frequency dependence of attenuation, with higher magnitudes at sonic frequencies, where the squirt flow mechanism may be dominant. In contrast to sandstone, the magnitude of compressional to shear attenuation ratio (QP−1/QS−1) was found to be greater than unity in both dry and brine fully saturated carbonate samples at ultrasonic frequencies. This result may be due to the complex porosity structure of carbonate rocks, which makes it not appropriate to the sandstone rock physics models.