Phase Field Model of Hydraulic Fracturing in Poroelastic Media: Fracture Propagation, Arrest, and Branching Under Fluid Injection and Extraction

Abstract The simulation of fluid‐driven fracture propagation in a porous medium is a major computational challenge, with applications in geosciences and engineering. The two main families of modeling approaches are those models that represent fractures as explicit discontinuities and solve the moving boundary problem and those that represent fractures as thin damaged zones, solving a continuum problem throughout. The latter family includes the so‐called phase field models. Continuum approaches to fracture face validation and verification challenges, in particular grid convergence, well posedness, and physical relevance in practical scenarios. Here we propose a new quasi‐static phase field formulation. The approach fully couples fluid flow in the fracture with deformation and flow in the porous medium, discretizes flow in the fracture on a lower‐dimension manifold, and employs the fluid flux between the fracture and the porous solid as coupling variable. We present a numerical assessment of the model by studying the propagation of a fracture in the quarter five‐spot configuration. We study the interplay between injection flow rate and rock properties and elucidate fracture propagation patterns under the leak‐off toughness dominated regime as a function of injection rate, initial fracture length, and poromechanical properties. For the considered injection scenario, we show that the final fracture length depends on the injection rate, and three distinct patterns are observed. We also rationalize the system response using dimensional analysis to collapse the model results. Finally, we propose some simplifications that alleviate the computational cost of the simulations without significant loss of accuracy.