The effect of stress boundary conditions on fluid‐driven fracture propagation in porous media using a phase‐field modeling approach

Abstract

Summary A phase‐field approach for fluid‐driven fracture propagation in porous media with varying constant compatible stress boundary conditions is discussed and implemented. Since crack opening displacement, fracture path, and stress values near the fracture are highly dependent on the given boundary conditions, it is crucial to take into account the impact of in situ stresses on fracturing propagation for realistic applications. We illustrate several numerical examples that include the effects of different boundary conditions on the fracture propagation. In addition, an example using realistic boundary conditions from a reservoir simulator is included to show the capabilities of our computational framework.

A phase-field description for pressurized and non-isothermal propagating fractures

“…Remark 2.5. When normal stresses (traction forces) are prescribed on (parts of ) the boundary, the term τ = τ − (p − p 0 )n + C Θ (Θ − Θ 0 )n must be carefully considered; see [42] or [35][Section 5.2].…”

Simulation of debris flow on an instrumented test slope using an updated Lagrangian continuum particle method

“…The past decades have seen significant development in computational methods for problems in fracture mechanics, damage modeling, strain localization, and unsaturated soil mechanics. For this type of problems, the finite element method remains the preferred computational platform [35,43,52,53,62,73,75], even as a number of continuum particle methods have also emerged as viable alternatives in recent years [35,[58][59][60]62]. However, when it comes to debris flow modeling, where the motion is so chaotic that element connectivity is difficult to impose, the finite element method may not be an appropriate platform to use, since it suffers from severe mesh distortion that impacts on its accuracy and overall performance.…”

Variational Phase‐Field Modeling of Hydraulic Fracture Interaction With Natural Fractures and Application to Enhanced Geothermal Systems

“…The phase-field variable describes the transition from intact to fully damaged state of the material over a specific length scale. Seminal works of the application of the V-pf approach to hydraulic fracture include Bourdin et al (2012) and Chukwudozie et al (2013) while following studies addressed problems related to poroelasticity (Mikelić et al, 2015;Miehe, Hofacker, et al, 2015;Santillán et al, 2017;Wilson & Landis, 2016;Wheeler et al, 2014), fracture width computation (Lee et al, 2017;Xia et al, 2017), coupling with the theory or porous media (Ehlers & Luo, 2017;Heider & Markert, 2017), pressure-dependent failure mechanisms (Choo & Sun, 2018), mass conservation (Chukwudozie et al, 2019), and in situ stresses (Shiozawa et al, 2019). The smeared representation can handle complex fracture topology where natural fractures can be represented within nonconforming discretizations, without a priori assumptions on their geometry or restriction on hydraulic fracture growth trajectories (Yoshioka & Bourdin, 2016).…”