An experimental investigation into surface roughness of a hydraulic fracture
Abbas Movassagh A C , Manouchehr Haghighi A , Dane Kasperczyk B , Mohammad Sayyafzadeh A and Xi Zhang BA University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia.
B CSIRO Energy, Melbourne, Vic. 3168, Australia.
C Corresponding author. Email: abbas.movassagh@adelaide.edu.au
The APPEA Journal 58(2) 728-732 https://doi.org/10.1071/AJ17134
Accepted: 22 February 2018 Published: 28 May 2018
Abstract
The fracture surface roughness is an essential characteristic of the hydraulic fracturing process and has not been fully explored. The surface asperities play a significant role in proppant flow and settlement, fluid leak-off and fracture tip movement. In this study, we performed an experimental investigation to evaluate the fracture surface roughness of a hydraulic fracture generated in the lab tests. The experiments were conducted using a polyaxial cell and a cuboid siltstone block with dimensions of 20 cm × 20 cm × 16.5 cm. The fracturing fluid was injected into a drilled hole in the specimen to initiate and propagate the hydraulic fracture in nearly homogeneous siltstone material. Low injection rates were applied to all lab tests to maintain slow and stable fracture propagation as in the field. The fracture surfaces were digitised by surface mapping techniques utilising high-resolution laser scanning method and analysed using a standard statistical way. Our results showed that the surface topography and roughness parameters are different in various selected segments. However, they follow an increasing trend in radial directions from the initiation point at the wellbore wall toward the specimen borders.
Keywords: hydraulic fracturing experiment, laser scanning, polyaxial cell, surface roughness analysis.
Abbas Movassagh is a third-year Ph.D. student in petroleum engineering and management at the University of Adelaide. His research is on hydraulic fracturing experiments and modelling including roughness. Abbas is a SPE member and has over 9 years’ multidisciplinary experience in petroleum engineering as reservoir and well intervention engineer. |
Manouchehr (Manny) Haghighi is associate professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Adelaide. His research and teaching focus is on unconventional reservoirs, reservoir simulation, well testing and formation evaluation. He has supervised more than 40 M.Sc. and 10 Ph.D. students. Before joining the University of Adelaide in 2009, Manouchehr was associate professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Tehran. In 2000 Manouchehr established Simtech, a consulting company for the integrated reservoir simulation. He has been project director of several full-field simulation projects for oil and gas reservoirs. Manouchehr has published more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals or presented in international conferences. He has served as a reviewer for different journals such as the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering. |
Dane Kasperczyk is an engineer with CSIRO Energy Business Unit. He has 6 years’ experience in field-scale hydraulic fracturing for mining and conducting hydraulic fracture laboratory experiments focused on fractures crossing natural boundaries. He holds civil engineering and science degrees from University of Melbourne. |
Mohammad Sayyafzadeh is a lecturer in petroleum engineering at the University of Adelaide. He holds a B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering and M.Sc. in Reservoir Engineering from Tehran Polytechnic and a Ph.D. in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Adelaide. Mohammad’s research interest is applied and computational mathematics targeting reservoir and production engineering problems. He has contributed in publishing more than 20 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conferences, and serves as a reviewer for different journals and EAGE/SPE conferences. He is the lead investigator of a project on developing a computer-assisted history matching tool sponsored by Santos Ltd and participated as a co-investigator and research fellow in three other industrial projects. |
Xi Zhang is a research scientist with CSIRO Energy Business Unit. He has over 18 years’ experience in hydraulic fracture modelling. He holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Sydney. |
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