Full text loading...
-
A Coupled XFEM-EDFM Numerical Model For Hydraulic Fracture Propagation
- Publisher: European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers
- Source: Conference Proceedings, ECMOR XVI - 16th European Conference on the Mathematics of Oil Recovery, Sep 2018, Volume 2018, p.1 - 16
Abstract
Fracture propagation (FP) occurs in various applications including hydraulic fracturing, underground disposal of liquid waste, in-situ stress estimation, and the failure of dams due to underwater cracks. This work develops a numerical model of the hydraulic fracturing process that is widely applied to the extraction of natural gas from shale. Tensile fractures are created due to the injection of the highly pressurized viscous fluid into the brittle and quasi-brittle rock materials.
One issue associated with the modeling of the FP using unstructured fitted meshes is the necessity to remesh each time fractures move forward. The developed XFEM-EDFM scheme allows fractures to propagate without any need for remeshing. The fully coupled and fully implicit schemes ensure the stability of the current method. The J integral is applied to extract the stress intensity factors (SIF) of the mode I and II in the 2D domain. The criterion of the FP is based on the comparison of the SIF to the fracture toughness.
We investigate the fracture propagation algorithm. The hydraulic fracture propagation is also presented to demonstrate the computational capability.