Understanding fracture morphology

Field scale hydraulic fracture simulations reveal a variety of complex fracture geometries. Very often stress interaction between the fractures leads to very asymmetric fracture growth within a stage. At the same time, for some other cases, all the fractures are more regularly shaped and symmetric. This blog post presents results of numerical simulations and analysis demonstrating how fracture morphology changes versus problem parameters for some fundamental cases. The results can be used to better understand the observed fracture complexity in a field scale simulation or as a guideline to achieve the desired fracture morphology.