A numerical method for wave propagation in viscoelastic stratified porous media

This paper presents a numerical method, a transmission matrix method, for the wave propagation in viscoelastic stratified saturated porous media. The wave propagation in saturated media, based on Biot theory, is a coupled problem. In this stratified three-dimensional model we do the Laplace transform for the time variable and the Fourier transform for the horizontal space coordinate. The original problem is transformed into ordinary differential equations with six independent unknown variables, which are only the function of the coordinate of depth. Thus, we get a transmission matrix of the wave problem for each layer. In the process of solution we use numerical method to calculate the eigenvalues and the eigenvectors of the transmission matrices. In the first step of the solution process we can obtain the wave field in the transformed space. The fast Fourier transform (FFT) method is used to do the inverse Laplace and the inverse Fourier transforms to get the solution in the time space. The detailed formulae are derived and some numerical examples are given.