Simulation of Hydraulic Fracture Propagation Using XFEM

Inducing hydraulic fractures is vital in developing enhanced geothermal systems. To the same extent, simulation of such fluid-driven fractures is a complicated process to model even for simple geometries. This difficulty is subjected to the moving boundary conditions due to propagation of crack, non-linear governing equations of fluid flow within the fractures and the high gradient of mechanical deformation near the fracture tip. This paper presents an XFEM framework developed for numerical modeling of hydraulically induced fractures in a porous media interacting with the flow of fluid. This model takes the fully coupled hydro-mechanical processes into account and also, uses the concept of cohesive crack which is more suitable to describe the nonlinear behavior of the quasi-brittle material in the fracture process zone.