Hydraulic fracturing with distinct element method

Hydraulic fracturing with distinct element method

Pruiksma, J.P.
Bezuijen, A.

2002-04-01

In this report, hydraulic fracturing is investigated using the distinct element code PFC2D from Itasca. Special routines were written to be able to model hydraulic fracturing. These include adding fluid flow to PFC2D and updating the fluid flow domains when fractures appear. A brief description of this implementation and the modelling of the hydraulic fracturing is given. After the set-up of the hydraulic fracturing simulations has been discussed, with all the main input parameters, several main parameters are varied to study the resulting fracture patterns, pressure distributions and borehole pressures. These parameter studies are: particle size dependency of the simulations, behaviour at various confining stresses, the influence of the internal friction angle of the sand and the fracturing behaviour for different borehole injection rates. After this parameter study, comparisons are made with experiments done at TU Delft, GeoDelft and in the literature. The simulation results show the same trends as the experiments and are also in good agreement quantitatively.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:35894bde-6912-40dd-b0ad-224535c3dcd7

Delft Cluster

CO386730/12 ; DC710205

Institutional Repository

report

(c) 2002 Pruiksma, J.P. ; Bezuijen, A.