Modeling the Poromechanical Behavior of Microporousand Mesoporous Solids: Application to Coal

This chapter focuses on poromechanical modeling of porous solids, that is, of solids for which the mechanical behavior is significantly impacted by the presence of a fluid in its pore network. The size of the pores of such materials can vary on several orders of magnitude, for a loess. According to their size, pores can be divided into subcategories: macropores, mesopores, and micropores. The chapter describes how the mechanical behavior of such macroporous, mesoporous, or microporous media can be modeled in presence of fluids. For each type of medium, it discusses its specificities and the simplifications that can be made. As an application, the chapter considers the case of underground coal seams. It also consider a representative elementary volume of fractured coal, which is a representative of a small part extracted from the seam.