Contents

Compaction generally refers to the relative motion of °uid with respect to the deformable surroundings in a two-phase system. It has many geophysical and engineering applications, including liquefaction, formation of magma chamber, genesis of igneous rocks, foam drainage, and °ow in sediments. In this paper, we followed McKenzie's two-phase °ow formulation (1984) to study the °ow through a porous medium, which is a commonly used model for compaction study. Using the same approach as Barcilon and Lovera (1989), we studied the wave solution with and without melting e®ect, under the assumption that the ambient porosity is small. Sim-ilarity waves were of particular interest here. We discussed the necessary conditions for a speci¯c class of similarity waves to exist, followed by the general behavior of such waves and numerical determination of the solution for several cases. Parametric studies were also carried out to investigate the dependence of the solution on factors such as the melting rate, the density ratio, and the permeability of the solid matrix, etc