f Role of Geomechanical Simulations in Understanding the Evolution of Structural Damage

As structural features develop, they acquire a wide range of imposed material discontinuities and surfaces onto which strain becomes localised. Each such localisation feature acquires a distribution (in time and space) of petrophysical properties as a direct consequente of its structural history, with an obvious dependency on the host rock types. Because the evolved petrophysical properties will often be considerably different from those of the "undeformed" host rocks, fluid flow simulations need to account for the presence of the localisation features. Predicting their properties, and especially their flow effects at a variety of scales, is one of the big challenges of today.