3D modeling of cryogenic cracking by liquid nitrogen in coal under true triaxial stresses

Abstract

Coalbed methane (CBM) plays an indispensable role in total natural gas production and consumption, and for the bottlenecks encountered in stimulating CBM reservoirs by conventional fracturing methods, studying more environment-friendly and efficient stimulation methods is imperative. Cryogenic fracturing using liquid nitrogen has been trialed for the development of coalbed methane, demonstrating great significance as more and more research corroborated. This study extended our previous coupled thermo-mechanical-damage (TMD) numerical procedure to investigate the cryogenic fracturing or damage process in 3D coal cubes. The cryogenic fractures on concrete cubes along with analytical solutions of temperature and first principle stress distributions for the borehole cooling process were first employed to verify the correctness and feasibility of this method, which incorporates the boundary conditions affected by the Leidenfrost effect at the initial stage. Then sensitivity analyses of cryogenic fracture generation including the maximum fracture cross-sectional area and the fractured volume were carried out. Results show that the coal rock with a high modulus of elasticity and coefficient of thermal expansion is more prone to be damaged in terms of the cross-sectional area and volume than other parameters within the parameter range analyzed. Damage cross-sectional area and damage volume expand with both the increasing coefficient of thermal expansion and the increasing modulus of elasticity, while they shrink with increasing heat capacity and coal density. Cryogenic fractures are relatively less sensitive to the thermal conductivity, density, and heat capacity of coal. This 3D modeling study provides a technical route and a panorama of the cryogenic fracturing process under varied conditions in opaque coal rocks.