Fiber-Laden Proppant Placement in a Deformable Fracture: Influence of Fracture-Surface Roughness

During the shut-in stage of hydraulic fracturing, aperture decreases and proppant is trapped between the fracture walls. The amount and distribution of the trapped proppant determines the fracture permeability after fracture closure. Conventional fluids used in hydraulic fracturing typically form a uniform distribution of proppant within the fracture, i.e. proppant pack, and the fracture permeability is that of the proppant pack. In recent experiments, the addition of fibers to proppant mixtures has been shown to result in the formation of proppant-fiber islands surrounded by solids-free regions. The formation of such proppant-fiber islands has the potential to increase fracture permeability, however, the behavior of these islands when subjected to an applied stress is unknown. We present preliminary results from a series of experiments of fiber-proppant settling inside a deformable fracture with both smooth and rough walls. The experimental system consists of a 15cm x 15cm fracture cell that allows the direct application of a normal stress to the fracture surfaces while the entire flow field is imaged using a high-resolution CCD camera. The proppant mixture was prepared by adding 17.7% v/v of quartz sand and 0.4% v/v of polymeric fibers to a highly shear-thinning viscous fluid (0.48% w/w guar-water). The proppant mixture was injected into the fracture and allowed to settle uninterrupted for two hours before we incrementally increased the normal stress applied to the fracture surfaces from 0 to 90 kPa. The results for both smooth- and rough-walled fractures demonstrate the development of isolated proppant-fiber islands with some interconnected proppant-free regions. In the smooth-walled fracture, the isolated proppant islands settled towards the bottom of the fracture that resulted in some consolidation of the proppant mixture in the lower portion of the fracture. The proppant islands in the rough-walled fracture show a reduced amount of settling, resulting in uniformly distributed islands of proppant surrounded by interconnected open pathways within the fracture. Our results suggest that in real fractures, in which surface roughness is non-negligible, the addition of fibers to proppant mixtures is likely to increase fracture permeability relative to a similar proppant mixture without fibers.