DEM-FVM Conjugated Parallel Solver for Hydraulic Fracturing

The usage of distinct elements method (DEM) for stress-strain state (SSS) calculation is popular trend in hydraulic fracturing (HF) simulation. The main benefit of DEM approach is the flexible incorporation with another numerical schemes required for HF-simulation: fluid flow (FF) in fractured media and porous filtration (PF). Another benefit of DEM is seamless implementation of above scheme in parallel computing paradigm, namely in general purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU). The GPGPU computing move DEM based HF in area of practical application. In presented work, we describe the HF simulation approach where SSS scheme are implemented on most popular instance of DEM - Real Multidimensional Internal Bond (RMIB). The finite volume method (FVM) used to implement the two rest HF schemes: FF and PF. Proposed approach was implemented with help of CUDA program technology. The analytical KGD model and Blanton’s laboratory experiments used for numerical verification and efficiency estimation of described conjugate RMIB\FVM scheme.