The Poromechanics of Massive Fluid Injection in Natural Environments

摘要

The coupling between mechanical deformation and fluid flow in porous media is crucial for resource engineering applications such as solution mining, hydrocarbon recovery, carbon dioxide geosequestration, and coal seam gas mining. With the growing demand on energy and minerals, there is an increasing need to target unconventional naturally fractured deposits. These unconventional porous media typically exhibit non-linear material behaviour, finite deformations, large geometrical changes, and complex energy exchanges that remain poorly understood. Yet, most of the existing resource geomechanics simulators are limited to infinitesimal descriptions, ignore non-linear geometrical changes, and/or partially decouple the physical processes that take place in geological deposits. This is problematic because severe man-made geomechanical accidents usually induce large deformations that include non-linear material behaviour as well as non-linear geometrical changes and involve more than a single physical process. Therefore, mitigating large-scale failures using conventional geomechanics simulators is precarious. We propose an advanced non-linear poromechanics formulation and a high performance computing approach to investigate the finite deformation of poro-materials embedding natural faults and study the impact of multi-physics coupling and finite energy exchanges on the reactivation, propagation and coalescence of damage zones.