Stress-associated scattering attenuation and intrinsic attenuation from ultrasonic measurements

Abstract

Acoustic attenuation has been proved to be an indicator of stress changes in solid structures. Acoustic coda, as a superposition of incoherent scattered waves, reflects small-scale random heterogeneities in solids. Acoustic coda attenuation, as a combination of intrinsic attenuation and scattering attenuation, contains information on stress changes as a result of changes in the physical state of small-scale heterogeneous structures. Based on the ultrasonic measurements of a rock sample with intra-grain pores and fractures under different pore-pressure induced effective stresses, we compute the stress-associated coda attenuation quality factors QPC and QSC as a function of frequencies. Based on the digital heterogeneous cores of the sample, the experimental results are validated and corrected with numerical results by the finite-difference simulation of Biot's poroelastic equations and the Monte Carlo simulation of multiple scatterings, respectively. The quality factors characterize its scale dependence of scattering attenuation on stress variations in rocks. We compare them with the intrinsic attenuation quality factors QP and QS calculated by the spectral ratio method and BISQ model, respectively, from ultrasonic measurements. Comparisons demonstrate that the scattering attenuation is much stronger, particularly when ultrasonic wavelengths are comparable to the scale of pores and grains. The intrinsic and coda attenuations versus increasing effective stresses present quite different nonlinear features, where QPC and QSC show a greater sensitivity to pore pressure than QP and QS.