Hydraulic Fracture Propagation Simulations in Porous Media with Natural Fractures by IPACS

摘要

Recent studies reveal that unconventional reservoirs contain complex natural fracture networks.Thus,in stimulating hydraulic fractures,it is important to study the interactions between natural fractures and hydraulic fractures.The goal of this work is to describe practical aspects of recent advances in the domain of geomechanical and discrete fracture network coupling,stimulation modeling,treating large number of fractures,adaptive mesh refinement methods,and overall fracture management within an unconventional setting.The computational framework is developed as an in-house code named IPACS(Integrated Phasefield Advanced Crack Propagation Simulator).Here,we describe a diffusive adaptive finite element phase field approach for modeling natural and hydraulic fractures.High fidelity finite element methods are employed to model multiphase flow with local mass conservation and dynamic mesh adaptivity.Geomechanics approximated by a continuous Galerkin finite element method is coupled to multiphase flow approximated by an enriched Galerkin finite element method by applying an iteratively coupled scheme.