Abstract
Fracture propagation (FP) occurs in extensive applications including hydraulic fracturing, underground disposal of liquid waste, CO2 sequestration etc. It is crucial to develop a simulator that is able to reflect physics behind FP and capture the FP path. This work is an extension of the previous developed model (Ren et al. (2018), Ren & Younis (2018)) to the simulation of FP. One of the remarkable benefits using the coupled XFEM-EDFM scheme allows FP free of the remeshing. In this work, the onset of FP is controlled by a single parameter, the equivalent stress intensity factor (SIF). A domain integral method, J integral is applied to extract the SIF information. A time marching scheme is performed to ensure the SIF criterion satisfied everytime fracture propagates. The developed simulator is verified by the analytical solutions and shows the capability of FP simulation in poroelastic materials.
