Hydraulic fracture(HF) in porous rocks is a complex multi-physics coupling process which involves fluid flow, diffusion and solid deformation. In this paper, the extended finite element method(XFEM) coupling with Biot theory is developed to study the HF in permeable rocks with natural fractures(NFs). In the recent XFEM based computational HF models, the fluid flow in fractures and interstitials of the porous media are mostly solved separately, which brings difficulties in dealing with complex fracture morphology. In our new model the fluid flow is solved in a unified framework by considering the fractures as a kind of special porous media and introducing Poiseuille-type flow inside them instead of Darcy-type flow. The most advantage is that it is very convenient to deal with fluid flow inside the complex fracture network, which is important in shale gas extraction. The weak formulation for the new coupled model is derived based on virtual work principle, which includes the XFEM formulation for multiple fractures and fractures intersection in porous media and finite element formulation for the unified fluid flow. Then the plane strain Kristianovic-Geertsma-de Klerk(KGD) model and the fluid flow inside the fracture network are simulated to validate the accuracy and applicability of this method. The numerical results show that large injection rate, low rock permeability and isotropic in-situ stresses tend to lead to a more uniform and productive fracture network.
The continuum-based(CB)shell theory is combined with the extended finite element method(X-FEM)in this paper to model crack propagation in shells under static and dynamic situations.Both jump function and asymptotic crack tip solution are adopted for describing the discontinuity and singularity of the crack in shells.Level set method(LSM)is used to represent the crack surface and define the enriched shape functions.Stress intensity factors(SIFs)are calculated by the displacement interpolation technique to prove the capability of the method and the maximum strain is applied for the fracture criterion.Also,an efficient integration scheme for the CB shell element with cracks is proposed.
