Hydraulic fracture simulation using the GEOS code

International audienceThis paper discusses the issues involved in the development of a fully three-dimensional, massively parallel, finite element based simulation framework (GEOS) for addressing the fully coupled, hydro-mechanical behavior of jointed and fractured unconventional reservoirs to hydraulic stimulation. The framework is capable of describing the problems on large scale by implementing models for multi-scale treatment of geomaterials. Besides, the framework is able to explicitly representing fracture nucleation and propagation by using the technique of evolving mesh topology for both the fluid and solid meshes. It is also worthwhile to mention that the GEOS framework is designed to combine continuum and discontinuum approaches