Prediction of elastic and acoustic behaviors of calcarenite used for construction of historical monuments of Rabat, Morocco

Abstract

Natural materials (e.g. rocks and soils) are porous media, whose microstructures present a wide diversity. They generally consist of a heterogeneous solid phase and a porous phase which may be fully or partially saturated with one or more fluids. The prediction of elastic and acoustic properties of porous materials is very important in many fields, such as physics of rocks, reservoir geophysics, civil engineering, construction field and study of the behavior of historical monuments. The aim of this work is to predict the elastic and acoustic behaviors of isotropic porous materials of a solid matrix containing dry, saturated and partially saturated spherical pores. For this, a homogenization technique based on the Mori–Tanaka model is presented to connect the elastic and acoustic properties to porosity and degree of water saturation. Non-destructive ultrasonic technique is used to determine the elastic properties from measurements of P-wave velocities. The results obtained show the influence of porosity and degree of water saturation on the effective properties. The various predictions of Mori–Tanaka model are then compared with experimental results for the elastic and acoustic properties of calcarenite.

Keywords

• Calcarenite
• Porous media
• Homogenization
• Mori–Tanaka model
• Porosity
• Elastic properties
• Acoustic properties
• Degree of water saturation