Abstract
In this study, the evolution of hydraulically driven fractures in naturally layered and fractured media is investigated. The non-differentiable energy minimization approach to cohesive fracture is employed with a Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) discretization in which every element edge in the mesh is a potential site of cracks. The coupled hydro-mechanical model accounts for the flow continuity equation governing the hydro-fractures inflow in which the opening-dependent permeability of the hydro-fractures is modelled based upon the well-known cubic law. The proposed framework provides great flexibility in modeling multiple fractures and is applied to study the interaction between hydro-fractures and material interfaces in naturally fractured layered domains. Results indicate robustness and versatility of the algorithm and exemplify several simulation aspects there were eluded in many of the works in previous literature.
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