The investigation of partially saturated soils is preceded by the presentation of some fundamentals. Besides a short introduction to continuum mechanical modeling in the first part of the work general notions of acoustics are introduced as well as both body and surface waves in one-component media are analyzed. The modeling of multi-component media requires the introduction of additional microstructural variables, as for example, of porosity. Some models are presented which account for them in different manner. The models are applied to solve some important problems for saturated porous media because, even though they possess certain properties common with three-component models, their analysis is simpler than this of three-component materials. Some of these topics, as for instance the presentation of the micro-macro-procedure and the investigation of the propagation of monochromatic bulk waves is afterwards extended to three-component materials. Special attention is devoted to the determination of the influence of porosity and Poisson's number as well as of various couplings appearing in the models for saturated porous media. For saturated porous media also surface waves at the free boundary and at the interface with a fluid are investigated because their theoretical analysis may be the basis for the development of a nondestructive testing method of construction sites. Such results for unsaturated media are still missing.weiterlesen