Fluid-crack interaction in hydraulic fracturing.

摘要

Hydraulic fracturing has been one of the major improvements in petroleum engineering in the past few decades. Since then this process has been used progressively and over million wells have been fracked using hydraulic fracturing technology. A thorough understanding of the formation of fracture network and its propagation is essential to keep evolving the technology. In the present study, the Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics (LEFM) approach is applied to the crack propagation to understand the fluid crack interaction in brittle rocks under hydraulic loading. The boundary element method (BEM) is used to carry out the numerical analysis. Additionally, an explicit crack representation is used to update the crack during propagation. This explicit representation is applied to a fluid-filled crack in an impermeable, elastic solid and compared to the plane-strain hydraulic fracture problem with a fluid lag. This effort provides the oil and gas industry with more knowledge and understanding of fluid crack interaction in fracking.