Section 300

FRACTURING ENGINEERING MANUAL

May 1998 Schlumberger
Fracture Modeling Dowell
Page 4 of 35

2.1 Fundamental Laws

• Conservation of Mass: The mass of a system does not change with time. The
conservation of mass for modeling a fracture treatment is used to give the overall
material balance. This material balance is illustrated by Eq. 1.
Vi = V fp + VLP (1)

Where:
Vi = volume injected
Vfp = fracture volume
VLp = injected volume lost to the formation.
• Conservation of Momentum: Two types of forces can be distinguished; (1) the
body forces such as gravity that act on the whole volume, and (2) the surface
forces, such as pressure forces and fluid friction, that act only along the boundary
of the domain.
The conservation of momentum principle relates the time change in the total
momentum of a body to the applied forces (both on the volume and on the
surface). Many fracture treatments are modeled as quasistatic. This implies that
the rates of the change of velocities are negligible, and therefore the summation
of surface and volume forces is zero.
• Conservation of Energy: This pertains primarily to the two fundamental laws of
thermodynamics for a system; (1) the change in total energy of a system is equal
to the work of the forces applied on the system plus the rate of heat transfer, and
(2) the internal energy of a system is a function only of its entropy.

2.2 Constitutive Laws

A mechanical system is completely defined by a certain number of variables that
depend on time and position.
• mass
• temperature
• velocity (three components)
• stresses (six components).
These variables make a minimum of 11 unknowns while the number of components
in the three conservation laws is only five. Therefore, constitutive equations to solve
the system need to be defined. Some equations used in the less complicated
models can be simplified to the point where they no longer apply, thereby reducing
the number of computations needed to complete a simulation.
Three types of constitutive relations are considered for the system.

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