Viscoelastic substitute models for seismic attenuation caused by squirt flow and fracture leak off

Journal article, 2019

We have investigated viscoelastic substitute models for seismic attenuation caused by fluid pressure diffusion in fluid-saturated porous media. Fluid pressure diffusion may locally occur associated with fracture leak off and/or squirt flow. We use a homogenization scheme with numerical model reduction (NMR), recently established in the literature, and we derive the corresponding viscoelastic material properties that are apparent at a larger scale (i.e., the observer scale). Moreover, we find that the rheology of the resulting viscoelastic model is of the Maxwell-Zener type. Based on a series of numerical experiments, we find that this method is able to accurately and efficiently predict the overall attenuation and stiffness moduli dispersion for a range of scenarios without resolving the substructure problem explicitly. Computational homogenization, together with NMR, can be useful to simulate seismic wave propagation using a viscoelastic substitute model that accurately reproduces the energy dissipation and dispersion of a heterogeneous medium in which squirt flow and/or fracture leak-off occurs.