Mécanique et mathématiques numériques en sciences géologiques
Computational challenges in the modeling of hydraulic fractures
Peirce, Anthony
University of British Columbia

Hydraulic fractures (HF) are a class of tensile fractures that propagate in brittle materials by the injection of a pressurized viscous fluid. In this talk I introduce models of HF and provide examples of natural HF and situations in which HF are used in industrial problems. Natural examples of HF include the formation of dykes by the intrusion of pressurized magma from deep chambers. They are also used in a multiplicity of engineering applications, including: the deliberate formation of fracture surfaces in granite quarries; waste disposal; remediation of contaminated soils; cave inducement in mining; and fracturing of hydrocarbon bearing rocks in order to enhance production of oil and gas wells. Novel and emerging applications of this technology include CO$_2$ sequestration and the enhancement of fracture networks to capture geothermal energy. I describe the governing equations in 1-2D as well as 2-3D models of HF, which involve a coupled system of degenerate nonlinear integro-partial differential equations as well as a free boundary. I demonstrate, via re-scaling the 1-2D model, how the active physical processes manifest themselves in the HF model and show how a balance between the dominant physical processes leads to special solutions. I discuss the challenges for efficient and robust numerical modeling of the 2-3D HF problem including: the rapid construction of Green’s functions for cracks in layered elastic media, robust iterative techniques to solve the extremely stiff coupled equations, and a novel Implicit Level Set Algorithm (ILSA) to resolve the free boundary problem. The efficacy of these techniques is demonstrated with numerical results.

Relevant papers can be found at: http://www.math.ubc.ca/~peirce

Mercredi, 19 juin, 10h00
Salle Du Jardin