The Boundary Element Method (BEM) is very rarely used for the simulation of problems in geomechanics even though it can mean a considerable improvement in user-friendliness, efficiency and accuracy compared to currently used domain based methods because only surfaces have to be discretized. The main reason why the BEM is not applied is because currently there are missing efficient and user-frie...

Analysis and forecasting of well performance data in unconventional reservoirs is and will likely remain problematic as there is considerable uncertainty related to our current lack of understanding of the fluid flow phenomenon in low/ultra-low permeability reservoir systems.There are many unknowns which are the primary sources of the uncertainty on production performance.To name a few, these c...

In general, thermodynamic admissibility requires isotropic materials develop reversible deformation induced anisotropy (RDIA) in their elastic stiffnesses. Taking the elastic potential for an isotropic material to be a function of the strain invariants, isotropy of the elastic stiffness is possible under distortional loading if and only if the bulk modulus is independent of the strain deviator ...

The Finite Element Method has been successfully applied to a variety of problems in engineering, medicine, biology, and physics. However, this method can be computationally intensive, particularly for problems in which an unstructured mesh of elements is generated. In such situations, the Algebraic Multigrid (AMG) can prove to be a robust method for solving the discretized linear systems that e...

Large amounts of hydrocarbon reserves are trapped in naturally fractured reservoirs which arechallenging in terms of accurate recovery prediction because of their joint fabric complexity andlithological heterogeneity. Canada, for example, has over 400 billion barrels of crude oil in fracturedcarbonates in Alberta, most of this being bitumen of viscosity greater than 106 cP in the GrosmontFormat...

The propagation of elastic waves in a fractured rock is investigated, both theoretically and numerically. Outside the fractures, the propagation of compressional waves is described in the simple framework of one-dimensional linear elastodynamics. The focus here is on the interactions between the waves and fractures: for this purpose, the mechanical behavior of the fractures is modeled using non...

In this work, we present numerical studies of fixed-stress iterative coupling for solving flow and geomechanics with propagating fractures in a porous medium. Specifically, fracture propagations are described by employing a phasefield approach. The extension to fixed-stress splitting to propagating phase-field fractures and systematic investigation of its properties are important enhancements t...

In this paper we consider numerical solution of 3D linear elasticity equations described by a coupled system of second order elliptic partial differential equations. This system is discretized by trilinear parallelepipedal finite elements. Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient iterative method is used for solving large-scale linear algebraic systems arising after the Finite Element Method (FEM) dis...