Section 300

FRACTURING ENGINEERING MANUAL

May 1998 Schlumberger
Fracture Modeling Dowell
Page 6 of 35

• Flux Laws: These include the relationships of pressure drop in a porous medium
to velocity (Darcy's law), of heat flux to temperature (Fourier's law) or the rate of
reaction to the change in concentration (Fick's law) for acid fracturing.

2.3 Fracture Propagation

Modeling the fracturing process is a very complicated task. Injecting fluid into the
formation will modify the stress distribution and pressure within the formation,
creating a fracture in which the injected fluid flows. This injected fluid exchanges
heat with the formation and leaks off into the formation. The poroelastic effect can
be interpreted as a time-dependent back-stress; whenever a fracture profile is
obtained and a pressure is calculated, an additional term must be added to the
pressure. The fluid is also considered to be a multiphase type because of the
proppant being carried. The proppant also alters the fluid viscosity, which affects the
fluid-flow model. A good model needs rigorous calculation of the fluid fronts as well
as handling the settling of the proppant as in the simpler 2D models up to convection
hindered settling and other more complicated accounting of the proppant in some of
the PL-3D models.
Simulating the propagation of a hydraulic fracture requires consideration of the linear
elastic fracture mechanics (LEFM) formulation, fracture fluid flow and continuity
equation. These three sets need to be coupled to simulate the propagation; the
mathematical problem is complex because of the different types of equations and the
presence of a moving boundary (fracture edge).
The strains produced in the formation caused by the deformation from inducing a
hydraulic fracture are actually quite small. The small value of strain allows the
assumption that the formation deforms in a linear elastic manner. Knowing the state
of stress (or pressure) induced by the fluid in the fracture and the confining stresses
(boundary conditions) allows the calculation of the fracture width (displacement).
One simple method is to consider the crack as a uniformly pressurized elliptical
surface with semiaxes a and b. This condition forces the fracture to assume an
elliptical shape (Sneddon). Different cases may be derived from Sneddon's solution.
These cases can relate to the Griffith crack as well as the radial or penny-shaped
crack. This will be covered in more detail in the discussion of 2D models. The
classical techniques in elasticity do have severe limitations because of the stress
singularity near the crack tip, and special methods have to be used to improve the
accuracy in computing the stress intensity factors. Boundary integral techniques
have become popular because the problem is solved only at the boundary, reducing
the dimension of the problem by one, and provides a simple method to determine
stress intensity factors. However, implementation can be difficult for
nonhomogeneous media with varying elastic moduli.
Remember from the section on rock mechanics that the stress intensity factor (KI) is
for the opening mode of the fracture and describes the magnitude of the stresses
near the crack tip — it depends on the crack geometry, surrounding material and
applied loads. Fig. 1 shows the three fundamental modes of loading for a fracture.

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