Hydraulic fracturing

Hydraulic fracturing has revolutionized the oil and gas industry, and decades of field practice have enabled a deep understanding of many aspects of the process. However, several key phenomena remain insufficiently addressed:

1. The conventional mode-I fracture propagation mechanism does not explain the observed generation of fracture swarms;
2. Modeling of fracture growth coupled with proppant transport and settlement requires significant improvement;
3. Fracture closure during shut-in and flowback periods—and the resulting residual fracture aperture—are still not well characterized.

Beyond the inherent complexity of these multiphysics processes, achieving high-fidelity modeling of hydraulic fracturing demands extensive computational resources. Our group is developing advanced computational tools, incorporating refined physical mechanisms and GPU-accelerated simulations, to tackle these challenges.

Related publications

1. W. Jin, C. Arson, (2019). Fluid-driven transition from damage to fracture in anisotropic porous media: a multi-scale XFEM approach. Acta Geotechnica, 15(1), 113-144.
2. Jin, W., Zhao, C., Pham, V. V., Yang, M., Egert, R., McLing, T., … & Villamor-Lora, R. (2025, June). ELK: a MOOSE framework based computational tool for modeling electro-hydraulic fracturing. In ARMA US Rock Mechanics/Geomechanics Symposium (p. D021S009R002). ARMA.