Abstract
This chapter provides different models for the acoustic wave propagation in porous materials having a rigid and an elastic frames. The direct problem of reflection and transmission of acoustic waves by a slab of porous material is studied. The inverse problem is solved using experimental reflected and transmitted signals. Both high- and low-frequency domains are studied. Different acoustic methods are proposed for measuring physical parameters describing the acoustic propagation as porosity, tortuosity, viscous and thermal characteristic length, and flow resistivity. Some advantages and perspectives of this method are discussed.
Keywords
- acoustic porous materials
- porosity
- tortuosity
- viscous and thermal charactertistic lengths
- fractional derivatives
1. Introduction
More than 50 years ago, Biot [1, 2] proposed a semi-phenomenological theory which provides a rigorous description of the propagation of acoustic waves in porous media saturated by a compressible viscous fluid. Due to its very general and rather fundamental character, it has been applied in various fields of acoustics such as geophysics, underwater acoustics, seismology, ultrasonic characterization of bones, etc. Biot’s theory describes the motion of the solid and the fluid, as well as the coupling between the two phases. The loss of acoustic energy is due mainly to the viscosity of the fluid and the relative fluid-structure movement. The model predicts that the acoustic attenuation, as well as the speed of sound, depends on the frequency and elastic constants of the porous material, as well as porosity, tortuosity, permeability, etc. The theory predicts two compressional waves: a fast wave, where the fluid and solid move in phase, and a slow wave where fluid and solid move out of phase. Johnson et al. [3] introduced the concept of tortuosity or dynamic permeability which has better described the viscous losses between fluid and structure in both high and low frequencies.
Air-saturated porous materials such as plastic foams or fibrous materials are widely used in passive control and noise reduction. These materials have interesting acoustic properties for sound absorption, and their use is quite common in the building trade and automotive and aeronautical fields. The determination of the physical parameters of the medium from reflected and transmitted experimental data is a classical inverse scattering problem.
Pulse propagation in porous media is usually modeled by synthesizing the signal via a Fourier transform of the continuous wave results. On the other hand, experimental measurements are usually carried out using pulses of finite bandwidth. Therefore, direct modeling in the time domain is highly desirable [4–10]. The temporal and frequency approaches are complementary for studying the propagation of acoustic signals. For transient signals, the temporal approach is the most appropriate because it is closer to the experimental reality and the finite duration of the signal. However, for monochromatic harmonic signals, the frequency approach is the most suitable [11].
Fractional calculus has been used in the past by many authors as an empirical method to describe the viscoelastic properties of materials (e.g., see Caputo [12] and Bagley and Torvik [13]). The fact that acoustic attenuation, stiffness, and damping in porous materials are proportional to the fractional powers of frequency [4, 5, 7, 9, 10] suggests that fractional-order time derivatives could describe the propagation of acoustic waves in these materials.
In this chapter, acoustic wave propagation in porous media is studied in the high- and the low-frequency range. The direct and inverse scattering problems are solved for the mechanical characterization of the medium. The general Biot model applied to porous materials having elastic structure is treated, and also the equivalent fluid model, used for air-saturated porous materials ( Figures 1 and 2 ).

Figure 1.
Air-saturated plastic foam.

Figure 2.
Human cancellous bone sample.
2. Porous materials with elastic frame
In porous media, the equations of motion of the frame and fluid are given by the Euler equations applied to the Lagrangian density. Here,
where
The Young modulus and the Poisson ratio of the solid
The mass coupling parameter
where
where
The range of frequencies such that viscous skin thickness
is called the low-frequency range. For these frequencies, the viscous forces are important everywhere in the fluid. When
where
where
The introduction of the tortuosity operator
In these equations, the temporal operators
where
The wave equations of dilatational and rotational waves can be obtained using scalar and vector displacement potentials, respectively. Two scalar potentials for the frame and the fluid,
where
Two distinct longitudinal modes called fast and slow waves are obtained by the resolution of the eigenvalue problem of the matrix of Biot (Eq. (14)). On a basis of fast and slow waves
where
Their corresponding eigenvectors are
where
and
Coefficients
The fast and slow waves
where the coefficients
and
where Eq. (18) is a fractional propagation equations [17] in time domain of the fast and slow waves, respectively. These equations describe the attenuation and the spreading of the temporal signal propagating inside the porous material. These fractional propagation equations have been solved and well-studied in the case of rigid porous materials using the equivalent fluid model.
3. Porous materials with rigid frame
In the acoustics of porous media, two situations can be distinguished: elastic and rigid frame materials. In the first case, the Biot [1, 2] theory is best suited. In the second case, the acoustic wave cannot vibrate the structure. The equivalent fluid model is then used, in which the acoustic wave propagates inside the saturating fluid [8, 11]. The equations for the acoustics in the equivalent fluid model are given by
In these relations,
In Eq. (20), the viscous and thermal losses that contribute to the sound damping in acoustic materials are not described. The thermal exchanges are generally negligible near viscous effects in the porous materials obeying to the Biot theory, this is not the case for air-saturated porous materials using the equivalent fluid model. To take into account the fluid-structure exchanges, the density and compressibility of the fluid are “renormalized” by the dynamic tortuosity
The thermal exchanges to the fluid compressions-dilatations are produced by the wave motion. The parts of the fluid affected by the thermal exchanges can be estimated by the ratio of a microscopic characteristic length of thermal skin depth thickness
The expression of the dynamic compressibility is given by
where
where
In a high-frequency limit, Allard and Champoux [18] showed the following behavior of
Replacing
In the time domain (using the convention
In this equation, the term
with
where
and
Let us consider a homogeneous porous material which occupies the region
where
These expressions are simplified by taking into account the reflections at the interfaces
where
3.1. Ultrasonic measurement of porosity, tortuosity, and viscous and thermal characteristic lengths via transmitted waves
The experimental setup consists of two transducers broadband Ultran NCT202 with a central frequency of 190 kHz in air and a bandwidth of 6 dB extending from 150 to 230 kHz [19]. A pulser/receiver 5058PR Panametrics sends pulses of 400 V. The high-frequency noise is avoided by filtering the received signals above 1 MHz. Electronic interference is eliminated by 1000 acquisition averages. The experimental setup is shown in
Figure 3
. The inverse problem is to find the parameters

Figure 3.
Experimental setup of the ultrasonic measurements.
Consider a sample of plastic foam M1, of thicknesses

Figure 4.
Experimental incident signal (solid line) and experimental transmitted signal (dashed line).

Figure 5.
Variation of the minimization function

Figure 6.
Variation of the cost function

Figure 7.
Comparison between the experimental transmitted signal (black dashed line) and the simulated transmitted signals (black line) using the reconstructed values of
3.2. Measuring flow resistivity of porous material via acoustic reflected waves at low-frequency domain
In the low-frequency domain, the viscous forces are important everywhere in all the fluid saturating the porous material. The thermal exchanges between fluid and structure are favored by the slowness of the cycle of expansion and compression in the material. The temperature of the frame is practically unchanged by the passage of the sound wave because of the high value of its specific heat: the frame acts as a thermostat; the isothermal compressibility is directly applicable. In this domain, the viscous skin thickness
We consider the low-frequency approximations of the response factor
For a wave traveling along the direction
where the Euler equation is reduced to Darcy’s law which defines the static flow resistivity
The fields which are varying in time, the pressure, the acoustic velocity, etc. follow a diffusion equation with the diffusion constant:
The diffusion constant
where
The expression of the reflection coefficient
The development of these expressions in exponential series leads to the reflection coefficient:
The multiple reflections in the material are taken into account in these expressions. As the attenuation is high in the porous materials, the multiple reflection effects are negligible. Let us consider the reflections at the interfaces
The reflection scattering operator is calculated by taking the inverse Laplace transform of the reflection coefficient.
We infer [32] that
where erf is the error function. By putting
we obtain
Using the relation
which with the variable change
The reflection scattering operator is then given by
3.2.1. Acoustic parameter sensitivity
Consider a sample of porous material having a physical parameters that correspond to quite common acoustic materials, as follows: thickness
To obtain the simulated reflected waves, we use the incident signal given in
Figure 8
(dashed line). The result (reflected wave) is the wave given in the same figure (
Figure 8
) in solid line. The spectra of the two waves (incident and reflected) are given in
Figure 9
. From
Figure 8
, we can see that there is just an attenuation of the reflected wave without dispersion, since the two waves have the same spectral bandwidth (
Figure 9
).
Figure 8
shows the results obtained after reducing flow resistivity by

Figure 8.
Incident signal (dashed line) and simulated reflected signal (solid line).

Figure 9.
Spectrum of incident signal (dashed line) and spectrum of reflected signal (solid line).
For the propagation of transient signals at low frequency, a guide (pipe) [32], having a diameter of 5 cm and of length 50 m, is chosen. The pipe can be rolled without perturbations on experimental signals (the cutoff frequency of the tube
where

Figure 10.
Experimental setup of acoustic measurements.

Figure 11.
Experimental incident signal (solid line) and experimental reflected signal (dashed line), and their spectra, respectively.

Figure 12.
Variation of the minimization function

Figure 13.
Comparison between experimental reflected signal (dashed line) and simulated reflected signal (solid line) for the sample M1.
This alternative acoustic method has the advantage of being simple and effective since it requires the use of only one microphone and therefore no calibration problem. In addition, this approach is different from conventional methods (Bies and Hansen [33]) that involve the use of fluid flow measurement techniques and pressure differences. The mathematical analysis of the reflected wave at low frequency is quite simple, because this wave is not propagative in the medium but simply diffusive (having the same frequency band with the incident signal). The wave reflected by the resistive materials has the advantage of being easily detectable experimentally compared to the transmitted wave.
4. Conclusion
Acoustic propagation in porous media involves a large number of physical parameters when the structure is elastic. This number is reduced when the structure is rigid, because the mechanical part does not intervene and thus remains only the acoustic part. The study of high and low frequencies separately solves the inverse problem and characterizes the porous materials in the domain of influence of the physical parameters. The proposed methods are simple and effective and allow an acoustic characterization of porous materials using transmitted or reflected experimental waves.
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