A micro-mechanical model for the Biot theory of acoustic waves in a fully saturated granular material

In the context of the classical Biot theory for acoustic waves in a fully-saturated granular material, we improve upon the constitutive relation of the solid phase by means of micro-mechanical modeling. This is needed to explain discrepancies on the dependency of the frequency with the sound speed attenuation and dispersion between present models and experiment. As first step, we provide a more detailed description of the interaction between the particles and water. A Standard Linear Solid model is proposed to represent the behavior at contact level between particles immersed in a compressible fluid.