Calculation of Vertical Fracture Containment in Layered Formations

Abstract

Summary An analytic procedure for calculating vertical fracture extent in symmetrical trilayered formations was extended to multilayered, asymmetrical formations using a semianalytic technique. The fracture extents computed by this method were compared with those calculated with the finite-element method. It was found that even for modulus variations between layers as large as a factor of 5, the semianalytic procedure gave exactly the same results as the finite-element solution in a fraction of the computation time and with significantly less manual data manipulation. It is recommended that the analytic and numerical procedures be used in a complementary manner to calculate fracture-width profiles in layered formations.