Attenuation of acoustic modes due to viscous drag at the borehole wall

White (1983), among others, has shown that the propagation and attenuation of Stoneley waves in a fluid‐filled borehole contain information on the porosity and permeability of the surrounding formation. Prior to extracting permeability from attenuation, the correct viscous loss of Stoneley waves in a borehole in a nonporous medium must be completely understood. With this motivation in mind, the purpose of this paper is to derive the viscous loss due to drag at the wall of a borehole from the exactly solvable case of a perfectly cylindrical borehole in an elastic, nonporous formation filled with a fluid that is viscous in shear. Thus the fluid pressure and fluid motion in the small but critical region near the fluid‐solid interface can be calculated. We have obtained dispersion and attenuation of trapped waves and tube waves, but here we report only on tube waves.