Seismic wave propagation in coupled fluid and porous media: A finite element approach

We present a numerical method to simulate seismic wave propagation in coupled fluid and porous media. We developed a numerical finite element–based algorithm to approximate solutions to viscoacoustic and Biot's equations, considering the open pore conditions at the interfaces between both media. The algorithm architecture allows to simulate arbitrary distributions of viscoacoustic and poroelastic regions, facilitating the modelling of heterogeneous systems involving complex geometries. The algorithm includes a double parallelization scheme whose efficiency in terms of computing time and memory requirements was tested for different core distributions and mesh sizes. We validate our proposal by performing a comparison between its results and those obtained with a well-known freely available code. We test its capabilities by studying two different scenarios with geophysical interest: a lake with an irregular bottom and a fractured porous medium.