Proppant transport in dynamically propagating hydraulic fractures using CFD-XFEM approach

Abstract

Numerically modelling the fluid flow with proppant transport and fracture propagation together 11 are one of the significant technical challenges in hydraulic fracturing of unconventional 12 hydrocarbon reservoirs. The existing models either model the proppant transport physics in 13 static predefined fracture geometry or account for the analytical models for defining the fracture 14 propagation. Furthermore, the fluid leak-off effects are usually neglected in the hydrodynamics 15 of proppant transport in the existing models. In the present paper, a dynamic and integrated 16 numerical model is determined that uses computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique to 17 model the fluid flow with proppant transport and Extended finite element method (XFEM) to 18 model the fracture propagation. The results of fracture propagation were validated with the real 19 field results and analytical models, and the results of proppant transport are validated with the 20 experimental results. The integrated model is then used to comprehensively investigate the hydrodynamical properties that directly affect the near-wellbore stress and proppant distribution inside the fracture. The model can accurately model the proppant physics and also propose a solution to a frequent challenge faced in the petroleum industry of fracture tip screen out. Thus, using the current model allows the petroleum engineers to design the hydraulic fracturing operation successfully, model simultaneously fracture propagation and fluid flow with proppant transport and gain confidence by tracking the distribution of proppants inside the fracture accurately. Keywords Hydraulic fracturing, XFEM-based cohesive law, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Proppant transport; Fluid leak-off; Fracture propagation; Fracture tip screen-out Highlights • Proppant transport model with fluid leak-off and dynamic fracture propagation • Fluid flow modelled using CFD-DEM hybrid model and propagation using XFEM model • Results validated with real field data, analytical model and experimental study • Effect of injection rate, fluid viscosity and leak-off rate investigated • Investigated the parameters to mitigate fracture tip screen-out Graphical abstract

Failure Patterns and Mechanisms of Hydraulic Fracture Propagation Behavior in the Presence of Naturally Cemented Fractures

“…Accordingly, as shown in Fig. 3, displacement u(x) in the domain can be approximated as [8,20,25,29,30].…”

“…Klimenko et al [16] subsequently modified the above-mentioned XFEM model to consider HF propagation in both toughness-dominated and viscosity-dominated regimes. Recently, many scholars use XFEM model to simulate hydraulic fracturing problems due to its advantage of avoiding using a conforming mesh [27][28][29][30].…”

Study on the Law of True Triaxial Hydraulic Fracturing by Acoustic Emission Monitoring

“…Wang et al 17 simulated the interaction between hydraulic and natural fractures by the EPM fracture simulation method. Hosseini et al 18 established a numerical model of hydraulic fracturing proppant migration and ejection based on X-FEM numerical simulation and studied the proppant migration and fracture propagation behaviors under different formation conditions. Mukhtar et al 19 applied a coupled multiphysics 3-D generalized finite element method (GFEM) based on the regularized Irwin criterion and adaptive mesh refinement to the simulation of hydraulic fracturing and verified the simulation results with experiments.…”

Simulation and solution of a proppant migration and sedimentation model for hydraulically fractured inhomogeneously wide fractures

“…Isaev et al (2023) proposed adaptive seeding/reseeding methods with exact integration of particles trajectories and local time step refinement in the vicinity of injection zones In these studies, equations describing the migration and sedimentation of proppant were derived based on the solid-liquid coupling relationship and sedimentation law during proppant flow (Hu et al, 2023;Li et al, 2023;Shi, 2016), and most of them were simulated with CFD-DEM (Gong et al, 2023;Liu et al, 2019;Lv et al, 2023;Shi, 2016;Tong and Mohanty, 2016;Xiang and Li, 2023;Zhang et al, 2022Zhang et al, , 2023aZhu et al, 2023) or CFD-XFEM software (Brannon et al, 2005;Qu et al, 2022Qu et al, , 2023Zhang et al, 2023b) such as fluent for two-dimensional and pseudo three-dimensional model. Through numerical simulations of parameters (Hang et al, 2023;Suri et al, 2019Suri et al, , 2020b based on different fracturing fluids and proppant morphologies, the velocity, concentration and pressure distribution of the proppant within the fracture were obtained, and proppant migration and sedimentation patterns were also derived for different fracture morphology parameters and proppant and fluid parameters. However, the current numerical models available in the literature involve more factors, suffer from complexity and poor convergence, they are usually too computationally intensive to be applied to large-scale problems, and are therefore of little utility to rapidly simulate the indoor experiments or even actual proppants conditions underground for hydraulic fracturing.…”