Micro-proppant placement in hydraulic and natural fracture stimulation in unconventional reservoirs: A review

Efficient simulation of hydraulic fractured wells in unconventional reservoirs

Reservoir simulators remain essential tools for improved reservoir management in order to optimize hydraulic fracturing design in unconventional low permeability reservoirs. However, the commonly-used simulator requires too much computational efforts for the description of local phenomena in the vicinity of the hydraulic fractures, and is practically infeasible for field applications, due to la...

Hydraulic Fracture Propagation near a Natural Discontinuity

The trajectory of a hydraulically driven crack near natural fractures, faults, and inhomogeneities has been studied using the complex variable hypersingular boundary element technique. The crack trajectories are presented for the cases of an oblique and a steeply inclined fault. It has been demonstrated that natural fractures, faults, and other inhomogeneities generate unstable fracture conÞgur...

Coupled 3-D numerical simulation of proppant distribution and hydraulic fracturing performance optimization in Marcellus shale reservoirs

New Insight on Deformation of Walnut/Ceramic Proppant Pack under Closure Stress in Hydraulic Fracture: Numerical Investigation

This study is an attempt to investigate the mechanical behavior of proppant packs deforming under compression loading. A generalized confined compression test (CCT) was simulated in the present study to investigate the deformation of walnut/ceramic proppants against compression. In this way, the CCT was simulated using ABAQUS explicit code. Unlike ordinary CCT, we obtained permeability of compr...

The Shear Mechanisms of Natural Fractures during the Hydraulic Stimulation of Shale Gas Reservoirs

The shearing of natural fractures is important in the permeability enhancement of shale gas reservoirs during hydraulic fracturing treatment. In this work, the shearing mechanisms of natural fractures are analyzed using a newly proposed numerical model based on the displacement discontinuities method. The fluid-rock coupling system of the model is carefully designed to calculate the shearing of...