Numerical Study of Proppant Transport in Intersected Fractures for Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Fracturing

Abstract

This study employs Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method to simulate particle transport in supercritical carbon dioxide fracturing. A dynamic leak-off model is integrated into the Eulerian-Eulerian two-fluid model. It systematically examines the transport of different-sized proppants in intersected fractures with leak-off and investigates the effects of proppant size, bypass fracture width, inter-fracture angle, and pumping schedule on the proppant distribution. Results show that the proppant split ratio increases with an increase in bypass fracture width and inter-fracture angle. Injecting larger-sized proppants before smaller-sized proppants can enhance the proppant bed length and height while reducing the proppant split ratio.