Variational Phase-field Modeling of Dynamic Hydraulic Fracture in Saturated Porous Media
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Over the last decades, hydraulic fracturing has emerged as a crucial technique in the extraction of oil and gas resources and the production of heat in deep geothermal energy plants. Despite its widespread use, exploring the dynamics of hydraulic fracturing in porous media requires a robust computational framework. The variational phase-field approach has gained increasing popularity due to its capability to simulate intricate fracture processes, encompassing crack nucleation, propagation, branching, and merging. In our study, we propose integrating the phase-field model with dynamic hydraulic fracturing to analyze wave propagation in saturated porous media. The numerical implementation employed the fixed stress split strategy described in [1] to solve the coupled dynamic hydro-mechanical phase-field problem. This proposed model has been implemented in the OpenGeoSys open-source code [2]. To assess the developed approach, we conducted a series of benchmarks, covering complex scenarios.
