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Modeling of hydraulic fracture in quasi-brittle rocks

Hydraulic fracturing technology has been widely applied in the petroleum industry for both waste injection and unconventional gas production wells. The prevailing analytical solutions for hydraulic fracture mainly depend on Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics. These methods can give reasonable prediction for hard rock, but are ineffective in predicting hydraulic fractures in quasi-brittle materials, such as ductile shale and sandstone. One of the reasons is that the fracture process zone ahead of the crack tip and the softening effect must be accounted for in quasi-brittle materials. In the current work, a set of chevron-notch three point bending tests were performed on sandstone samples，and the results were compared with the cohesive zone method based on finite element analysis. The numerical results fit the experimental data well and validates that the cohesive zone method, which uses a traction-separation law to describe the fracture process zone, can effectively model fracture nucleation and propagation in sandstone without taking porous effects into consideration. A 3D pore pressure cohesive zone model was developed to predict nucleation and propagation of a penny-shaped fluid-driven fracture. The predictions were compared with the analytical asymptotic solutions and a field minifrac test from the literature; it shows that the proposed method can not only predict the length and aperture of hydraulic fracture well, but also predict the bottomhole pressure with reasonable accuracy. Based on analytical asymptotic and computational solutions, parametric studies were conducted to investigate the effects of different parameters on the fracture aperture and fracture length, fracture process zone and bottomhole pressure.

Author(s):

Yao Yao    
School of Mechanics and Civil Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University
China

Lu Liu    
School of Mechanics and Civil Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University
China

Leon Keer    
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern University
United States