Simulation of fully coupled hydro-mechanical behavior based on an analogy between hydraulic fracturing and heat conduction

The hydraulic fracturing process involves complex coupling problems of the deformation and fracturing of solid and fluid flow in fractures. In this paper, a simple numerical tool for simulating the coupled hydro-mechanical behavior is developed by using an analogy between hydraulic fracturing and heat conduction. Using this analogy, the numerical implementation can be simply realized in the framework of a commercial finite element package ABAQUS with two user material subroutines to fully characterize the complex coupling problems of hydraulic fracturing. It is thus considerably simplified without any new development of user-defined element and fluid-solid solver but directly with the commercial finite element package. The proposed numerical tool along with the virtual crack method for elastic-brittle material is firstly verified by the classical 2D plain strain KGD analytical solution and then applied to several representative hydraulic fracturing problems and laboratory tests to illustrate its advantageous features. The present method is aiming to develop a useful numerical tool to study the coupled hydro-mechanical behavior of hydraulic fracturing. However, it is not limited to any specific materials and can be extended to other constitutive models that featured with the fully coupling problems of fluid and solid due to its simplicity.

Automated summary

In this paper, a simple numerical tool is developed to simulate the coupled hydro-mechanical behavior of hydraulic fracturing. By using an analogy between hydraulic fracturing and heat conduction, the numerical implementation is simplified and can be directly realized in the framework of the commercial finite element package ABAQUS. The proposed tool is versatile and can be applied to study various coupled problems.