A New Higher Order Displacement Discontinuity Method Based on the Joint Element for Analysis of Close-Spacing Planar Fractures

Summary The 2D displacement discontinuity method (DDM) has been widely used to characterize the hydraulic fracture geometry and the induced in-situ stresses in the oil and gas industry owing to its simplicity and accuracy. As smaller fracture spacing is used by multistage fracturing, the constant DDM (CDDM) loses its accuracy in predicting the fracture behaviors, especially for the inner fractures in a stage where they are subjected to the strong stress shadowing effect. In this paper, the 2D higher order DDM (HDDM) based on the joint elements was developed to overcome this limitation. The higher order displacement discontinuity intensively increases the accuracy of CDDM but maintains the same amount of computation time by using patched-element pattern. The joint elements are introduced to simultaneously determine the opening, shearing, and closing of each fracture element based on the stress boundary condition, which can avoid the “negative width” of the inner fractures given by CDDM which are mechanically closed under the strong stress shadowing effect. The developed 2D joint element HDDM (JE-HDDM) gives the same results with the CDDM when the fracture spacing is relatively large, but shows its outperformance in both efficiency and accuracy over the CDDM in predicting the displacement discontinuities and induced in-situ stresses in close fracture-spacing case.