VISCOELASTIC APPROXIMATION OF POROELASTIC MEDIA FOR WAVE SCATTERING PROBLEMS

Herein, we propose a simplified and approximate method for solving dyn amic problems in poroelastic media. The method is based on the definit ion of equivalent-viscoelastic materials that have the same wave numbe rs as poroelastic media. The viscoelastic approximation was applied to study the scatter of plane compressional waves by a spherical poroela stic inhomogeneity. In this wave scattering problem, the poroelastic a nd equivalent-viscoelastic solutions gave almost identical results far away from the inhomogeneity. The proposed method extends our existing numerical and analytical methods for poroelastic media. It is useful to derive approximate analytical solutions which can be applied for as sessing the damping characteristics of small amplitude waves in satura ted soils. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Limited.