Propagation of nonlinear thermoelastic waves in porous media within the theory of heat conduction with memory: physical derivation and exact solutions

In this paper, we study a mathematical model of nonlinear thermoelastic wave propagation in fluid-saturated porous media, considering memory effect in the heat propagation. In particular, we derive the governing equations in one dimension by using the Gurtin-Pipkin theory of heat flux history model and specializing the relaxation function in such a way to obtain a fractional Erdelyi-Kober integral. In this way, we obtain a nonlinear model in the framework of time-fractional thermoelasticity, and we find an explicit analytical solution by means of the invariant subspace method. A second memory effect that can play a significant role in this class of models is parametrized by a generalized time-fractional Darcy law. We study the equations obtained also in this case and find an explicit traveling wave type solution. Copyright (C) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.