The effective mechanical properties of reconstructed porous media

The purpose of the present paper is two-fold. First, a method of simulating geological porous media is presented ; the two first moments of the pore space phase function are measured on thin sections of Fontainebleau sandstones and used to reconstruct artificial media wsith the same average geometreical properties. Then, the effective elastic properties of the reconstructed samples are determined by solving the local equations of elasticity using a second-order finite difference formulation ; the local equations are discretized using the finite volume technique which incorporates the boundary conditions in such a way that the discretization holds for any geometry. Finally, the comparison between these effective elastic properties and the experimental results obtained on the same materials is presented and discussed.