Executive Summary : | Hydraulic fracturing is an arduous task to extract the oil present in the porous media such as shell rocks. The proposed project involves developing a fracture simulation model that facilitates the design of hydraulic treatment to carry out the hydraulic fracture for oil exploration. To achieve this, a fracture model based on the phase field approach is proposed in this work. Phase field model has been the choice of many researchers in the recent times owing to its simplicity and versatility in modeling the fracture nucleation, propagation, branching and merging with out the. requirement of any predefined crack and remeshing techniques. The recently developed hydraulic fracture models based on Phase field method mainly model the fracture considering it as a brittle fracture phenomena. However, for the more accurate and reliable design, the plastic deformations must also be taken into account. Hence in this is work, it is proposed to reformulate the existing models to account for the elasto-plastic deformations. The model can then be validated with the existing experimental results to test the efficacy of the proposed model. To achieve this ,a software will be developed to carry out the numerical simulations. Possible collaborations with the oil industries can be made and the developed software upon successful validation with the experiments can be transferred to these industries to use it under the existing ground conditions. |