Numerical Study of Transmission Signatures of Gas Hydrate-Bearing Microstructures

This work is inspired by the observation, that gas hydrate bearing sediments have a high velocity in combination with high attenuation.<br>We study numerically the influence of different gas hydrate locations within the pore space on transmitted p-waves. From the wave propagation simulations on the micro--scale it can be seen, that different positions of the gas hydrate in the pore space results in almost the same effective velocities and attenuation, as long as the gas hydrate had contact to the sediment grains. This changes in the case of a suspension, here the attenuation increases and the effective velocity decreases. The resulting p-wave versus gas hydrate saturation plot is in a qualitatively good agreement with experimental results obtained for the Mallik 2L-38 well.