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

Abstract: 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.