Poroelasticity describes the stress-relaxation response of materials due to the movement of fluid within the microstructure of an elastic material with interconnected pores (1). The presence of fluid-filled porous networks is ubiquitous in nature. Pressure-driven flow from interconnected porous networks is especially prevalent in plants, bones, and soft tissues, and has been attributed to critical functions in living systems, such as solute transport and mechanosensing (2,3). Tissues can vary greatly in their stiffness (elastic modulus), the architecture and anisotropy of the internal network (material permeability), and the material length scales, resulting in a range of mechanical behaviors (4). Often, during experimental testing, it is challenging to isolate the influence of poroelastic phenomena in complex materials which are also often influenced by other phenomena such as viscoelasticity, non-linear mechanics, etc (5,6). Our aim is to better understand the role poroelasticity plays under physiological loading conditions in mechanobiology. Here, we use the Finite Element software FEBio to simulate the mechanical response of poroelastic beams to harmonic excitation (7). Numerical simulations are performed for three-dimensional beams which are either bent transversely or compressed uniaxially. Parametric studies explore how poroelastic material properties, beam dimensions, and fluid draining boundary conditions influence the material’s response and the movement of fluid within the beam column. We compare our results to simulations performed for viscoelastic beams under the same conditions to speculate on the implications of poroelastic materials. Importantly, poroelasticity is influenced by length scale and fluid drainage whereas classical viscoelastic models are not. Our simulations guide the design of poroelastic materials to characterize them mechanically using dynamic nanoindentation, as models to better understand the mechanical role of water in biological materials.