Modellization of hydraulic fracturing of porous materials

TL;DR

This paper reviews microstructural models for hydraulic fracture growth in porous materials, highlighting their similarities to continuum theories and the impact of material disorder on fracture behavior.

Contribution

It introduces microstructural fracture models for porous materials and analyzes their scaling relations and effects of disorder on crack growth.

Findings

Microstructural models show similarities to continuum theories for simple cracks.

Scaling relations can be independent of crack geometry.

Disorder in material properties significantly affects fracture patterns.

Abstract

We review microstructural fracture growth models suitable for the study of hydraulic fracture processes in disordered porous materials and present some basic results. It is shown that microstructural models exhibit certain similarities to corresponding theories of continua. These similarities are most easily demonstrated for simple crack geometries, i.e., straight cracks (finite size scalings). However, there exist even scaling relations which are completely independent of the particular employed crack structure. Furthermore it is demonstrated that disorder in cohesional/flow properties can influence the crack growth and the resulting fracture geometry in an essential way.