A nonlocal model for fluid-structure interaction with applications in hydraulic fracturing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a nonlocal fluid-structure interaction model incorporating pore pressure effects, enabling improved simulation of hydraulic fracturing, consolidation, and subsidence in porous media with nonlinear materials.

Contribution

It presents a novel nonlocal formulation for fluid-structure interaction that effectively models pore pressure effects in porous materials, compatible with existing computational frameworks.

Findings

Effective modeling of leak-off during hydraulic fracturing

Simulation of consolidation in fluid-saturated rocks

Prediction of surface subsidence due to fluid extraction

Abstract

Modeling important engineering problems related to flow-induced damage (in the context of hydraulic fracturing among others) depends critically on characterizing the interaction of porous media and interstitial fluid flow. This work presents a new formulation for incorporating the effects of pore pressure in a nonlocal representation of solid mechanics. The result is a framework for modeling fluid-structure interaction problems with the discontinuity capturing advantages of an integral based formulation. A number of numerical examples are used to show that the proposed formulation can be applied to measure the effect of leak-off during hydraulic fracturing as well as modeling consolidation of fluid saturated rock and surface subsidence caused by fluid extraction from a geologic reservoir. The formulation incorporates the effect of pore pressure in the constitutive description of the porous material in a way that is appropriate for nonlinear materials, easily implemented in existing codes, straightforward in its evaluation (no history dependence), and justifiable from first principles. A mixture theory approach is used (deviating only slightly where necessary) to motivate an alteration to the peridynamic pressure term based on the fluid pore pressure. The resulting formulation has a number of similarities to the effective stress principle developed by Terzaghi and Biot and close correspondence is shown between the proposed method and the classical effective stress principle.