A phase-field model for hydraulic fracture nucleation and propagation in porous media

Many geo-engineering applications, e.g., enhanced geothermal systems, rely on hydraulic fracturing to enhance the permeability of natural formations and allow for sufficient fluid circulation. Over the past few decades, the phase-field method has grown in popularity as a valid approach to modeling hydraulic fracturing because of the ease of handling complex fracture propagation geometries. However, existing phase-field methods cannot appropriately capture nucleation of hydraulic fractures because their formulations are solely energy-based and do not explicitly take into account the strength of the material. Thus, in this work, we propose a novel phase-field formulation for hydraulic fracturing with the main goal of modeling fracture nucleation in porous media, e.g., rocks. Built on the variational formulation of previous phase-field methods, the proposed model incorporates the material strength envelope for hydraulic fracture nucleation through two important steps: (i) an external driving force term, included in the damage evolution equation, that accounts for the material strength; (ii) a properly designed damage function that defines the fluid pressure contribution on the crack driving force. The comparison of numerical results for two-dimensional (2D) test cases with existing analytical solutions demonstrates that the proposed phase-field model can accurately model both nucleation and propagation of hydraulic fractures. Additionally, we present the simulation of hydraulic fracturing in a three-dimensional (3D) domain with various stress conditions to demonstrate the applicability of the method to realistic scenarios

Adaptive multilevel space-time-stepping scheme for transport in heterogeneous porous media (ADM-LTS)

We present ADM-LTS, an adaptive multilevel space-time-stepping scheme for transport in heterogeneous porous media. At each time step, firstly, the flow (pressure) solution is obtained. Then, the transport equation is solved using the ADM-LTS method, which consists of two stages. In the first stage, an initial solution is obtained by imposing the coarsest space-time grid. This initial solution is then improved, in the second stage, by imposing a space-time adaptive grid on the cells where the solution does not satisfy the desired quality. The quality control is based on error estimators with user-defined threshold values. The time-integration procedure, in which the coarsest-scale solution provides local flux boundary conditions for sub-domains with local time refinement, is strictly mass conservative. In addition, the method employs space-time fine grid cells only at the moving saturation fronts. In order to ensure local mass conservation at all levels, finite-volume restriction operators and unity prolongation operators are developed. Several numerical experiments have been performed to analyze the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed ADM-LTS method for both homogeneous and heterogeneous permeability fields on two and three dimensional domains. The results show that the method provides accurate solutions, at the same time it maintains the computational efficiency. The ADM-LTS implementation is publicly available at https://gitlab.com/darsim2simulator

Incomplete mixing in porous media: Todd-Longstaff upscaling approach versus a dynamic local grid refinement method

Field-scale simulation of flow in porous media in presence of incomplete mixing demands for high-resolution computational grids, much beyond the scope of state-of-the-art simulators. Hence, the upscaling-based Todd and Longstaff (TL) approach is typically used, where coarse grid cells are employed with effective mixing fluid properties and parameters found by matching results obtained with fully resolved reference simulations. Dynamic local grid refinement (DLGR) techniques, on the other hand, only employ fine-scale grid resolution where the fully mixed assumption is not valid. The rest of the domain is then solved at coarser resolutions, where the fully mixed assumption is valid. Here, we assess the accuracy and the robustness of DLGR- and TL-based simulations of miscible displacements in homogeneous and heterogeneous porous media. Due to the intrinsic uncertainty within the unstable displacement nature of the studied incomplete mixing processes, the performance of the methods is also investigated based on a range of acceptable solutions rather than relying only on a single reference one. Systematic numerical results illustrate that the DLGR method is much more robust and accurate than the upscaling-based TL approach, and employs only a small fraction of fine-scale reference grids. Especially, the TL upscaling results (though history matched with computationally expensive fine-scale results) are very sensitive to the change of the simulation parameters. Based on this study, we propose a dynamic multilevel simulation strategy for efficient and reliable large-scale simulation of the complex incomplete mixing processes.Petroleum Engineerin