Impact of Partially Cemented and Non-persistent Natural Fractures on Hydraulic Fracture Propagation

This paper presents laboratory experiments exploring the interaction between hydraulic fractures and preexisting natural fractures that are strongly cemented relative to the host material strength but over only a portion of the natural fracture. Two sets of experiments were conducted, including the central region cemented case and the top–bottom region cemented case. Three main patterns are observed for the interaction between hydraulic fractures and partially cemented natural fractures: (1) complete crossing, (2) crossing with mismatched crack path and (3) no crossing. The results show that a hydraulic fracture penetrates directly through a fully and strongly cemented preexisting natural fracture. When the proportion of the strongly cemented region decreases or the height of the weak natural fracture increases, the hydraulic fracture is observed to persist through the entire height of the specimen both before and after the interface. However, the fracture path proceeds directly through strongly cemented portions while causing mismatched crack path at uncemented portions. No crossing results are obtained when the strongly cemented region is sufficiently small, around 30 % of the natural fracture’s height. Results of this seldom considered but almost certainly realistic configuration of partial cementing suggest that the hydraulic fracture path is strongly influenced by the size of the cemented region of the natural fracture.