SFB 1313 Publication "Modeling fracture propagation in poro-elastic media combining phase-field and discrete fracture models"

New SFB 1313 publication (University of Stuttgart/Politechnico di Milano, Italy), published in Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering. The work has been developed within the SFB 1313 research projects B03.

"Modeling fracture propagation in poro-elastic media combining phase-field and discrete fracture models"

Authors

• Samuel Burbulla (University of Stuttgart, former SFB 1313 researcher, research project B03
• Luca Formaggia (Politechnico di Milano)
• Christian Rohde (University of Stuttgart, former SFB 1313 researcher, research projects B03 and C02)
• Anna Scotti (Politechnico di Milano)

Abstract

We present a novel model for fluid-driven fracture propagation in poro-elastic media. Our approach combines ideas from dimensionally reduced discrete fracture models with diffuse phase-field models. The main advantage of this combined approach is that the fracture geometry is always represented explicitly, while the propagation remains geometrically flexible. We prove that our model is thermodynamically consistent. In order to solve our model numerically, we propose a mixed-dimensional discontinuous Galerkin scheme with a computational grid fully conforming to the fractures. As the fracture propagates, the diffuse phase-field acts as indicator to identify new fracture facets to be added to the discrete fracture network. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our approach reproduces classical scenarios for fracturing porous media.