Numerical Modeling for the Material Interface of Heterogeneous Rock at Mesoscale and Hydraulic Fracturing Based on the PHF-LSM-MT

The permeability-based hydraulic fracture(PHF) method is integrated with the level set method(LSM) and Mori-Tanaka(MT) model to study the hydraulic fracture propagation in heterogeneous rock(HR)with the mesoscale material interface being considered. In the proposed method, the PHF method is for simulating the hydraulic fracture propagation, and the LSM is for capturing the material interface with the mesoscale material properties of integration points being homogenized by MT model. To verify the mesoscale homogenization modeling procedure for HR, numerical simulations were carried out to estimate the effective elastic properties of HR with the volume fraction and inclusions' dimension being taken into account, and the results indicate that the proposed method is capable of homogenizing the material properties at mesoscale. Numerical simulations of hydraulic fracture propagation in HR with the mesoscale material interface show the characteristics of hydraulic fracture development, the features of pore pressures and stress paths of the equivalent fracture zone.