Numerical and Experimental Study of Wave Propagation in Water-Saturated Granular Media Using Effective Method Theories and a Full-Wave Numerical Simulation

In this article, the detection of an object buried in marine sediments is investigated. Using the results from a series of experiments realized in a tank filled with water and calibrated glass beads, we evaluate the performances for a wide range of the value of the ratio kd of the grain size to the wavelength (k is the wave number and d is the grain diameter) of three types of prediction tools. The first two prediction tools are based on the definition of an equivalent model. The first tool is based on the well-known Biot-Stoll theory (BM model) while the second tool uses nonperiodic homogenization to define effective velocity and anisotropy maps representing the medium (HM model). The last prediction tool implements a time-domain full-wave numerical method, which takes into account each grain separately (GM model). It is shown that a good agreement between experiments and numerical simulations can be achieved using the BM model for the low kd regime and the HM model for high kd regime.