PROPAGATION OF HYDRAULIC FRACTURE DRIVEN BY NON-NEWTONIAN FLUID IN PERMEABLE ROCK
This paper studies the solution of a fracture driven by an incompressible, viscous non-Newtonian fluid (with power-law rheology) propagating in an elastic, permeable rock under plane strain conditions. Based on the scaling considerations (Detournay and Garagash 2005), fracture evolution is characterized by two dimensionless time-dependent parameters with the meaning of, for example, toughness and leak-off, respectively. It is shown that for shear-thinning fluids, the fracture propagation regime evolves in time from the toughness/storage-to the viscosity/leak-off-dominated regime. The former is the regime when (i) the viscous dissipation in the fluid flow along the crack channel is negligible compared to the energy expended in fracturing the rock at the crack tip and (ii) the rate of fluid flow outflow from the crack into surrounding rock (leak-off) is negligible compared to the rate of flow along the crack. The opposite is true for the viscosity/leak-off-dominated regime when the viscous dissipation and the fluid leak-off processes dominate. A series expansion approach is used to compute numerically the limiting solution corresponding to fracture propagation in a very permeable rock and along a pre-existing discontinuity.
Jian Hu Dmitry I.Garagash
GeoEngineers, Inc.8410 154th Avenue NE,Redmond, WA 98052 Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, Clarkson University,Potsdam, NY 13699
国际会议
南京
英文
139-146
2006-05-22（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）