Home – Home – Jornals – Russian Geology and Geophysics 2006 number 5

The paper presents an approach implying constructing continuum images of liquid- or gas-saturated porous and cracked solids. The hypothesis of classical continuum mechanics that closely positioned points of a solid occur in similar physical conditions breaks down in the case of porous media in which fluid and matrix material have strongly different properties. We suggest to represent a real microheterogeneous body by its continuum image using continuum operators, whereby the conservation laws are applied rather to the image than to its prototype.
The continuum image is described by the standard equation of motion and the respective real solid by infinite-order equations. The latter include velocities of elastic waves as well as infinitely low velocities of anomalies due to a great number of the degrees of freedom in microheterogeneous media consisting of separate elementary blocks.