Computational modeling of hydraulic fracture in porous media

Date

2025-12-23

Author

Babaoğlu, Muhittin

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

184
views

0
downloads

Cite This

Although fracture is one of the most prevalent types of materials failure in engineering structures, its prediction and prevention remain arduous. In some applications, however, cracks are initiated and propagated intentionally using pressurized fluid to increase the permeability of different kinds of reservoirs for extracting underground energy resources such as hydrocarbons and geothermal energy easier. This technique is referred to as the hydraulic fracturing. In the last decade, the hydraulic fracturing of porous reservoirs has gained a lot of attention due to the drastically increased demand for underground energy resources. Besides the fieldwork and experimental studies, the theoretical and numerical modeling of hydraulic fracturing has also been an active area of research because of its much lower cost and favorable impact on the efficiency of the fieldwork. In this thesis, we develop a coupled thermo-hydro-damage-poro-elastic model for the hydraulic fracturing of porous media using a cohesive phase-field method. Prior to constructing the complete model, the implementation of each governing field equation is verified through the benchmark problems using their corresponding analytical solutions. For this model, we develop two novel approaches to calculate crack opening displacement, which is essential for the fluid flow modeling in the fracture. It is shown that the proposed approaches produce improved results compared to methods widely used in the literature. The proposed coupled thermo-hydro-damage-poro-elastic model can be used to solve realistic geothermal or isothermal hydraulic fracturing problems where the long and short terms of fluid pressure, displacement, temperature, and crack opening displacement results can be obtained.

Subject Keywords

Hydraulic fracturing, Porothermomechanics, Phase-field modeling, Crack opening displacement, Finite element method

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/118360

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis