The transport and placement of proppant within fractures is modeled in 3DEC by representing the proppant and fracturing fluid as a mixture.
This tutorial steps through the actions necessary to quickly create and solve a FLAC3D model. The focus of this tutorial is to provide you with a basic familiarity with the user interface and recommended work flow.
Injection testing conducted in 2017 and 2019 at the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy site in Utah evaluated flowback as an alternative to prolonged shut-in periods to infer closure stress, formation compressibility, and formation permeability. Flowback analyses yielded lower inferred closure stresses than traditional shut-in methods and indicated high formation compressibility, suggesting an extensive fractured system. Numerical simulations showed rebound pressure is not necessarily the lower bound of minimum principal stress. Stiffness changes can be identified as depletion transitions from hydraulic to natural fractures. The advantage if flowback is reduced time to closure.
This work presents a hybrid modeling approach to efficiently estimate and optimize rock movement during blasting. A small-scale continuum model simulates early-stage, near-field blasting physics and generates synthetic data to train a machine learning (ML) model. Key parameters such as expanded hole diameter, burden velocity, and gas pressure are obtained through the ML model, which then inform a discontinuum model to predict far-field muckpile formation. The approach captures essential blast physics while significantly accelerating blast design optimization.
It has become common practice to create a three-dimensional (3-D) geomechanical model for the analysis of rock stability.