A monolithic phase-field model of a fluid-driven fracture in a nonlinear poroelastic medium

In this paper, we present a full phase-field model for a fluid-driven fracture in a nonlinear poroelastic medium. The nonlinearity arises in the Biot equations when the permeability depends on porosity. This extends previous work (see Mikelić et al. Phase-field modeling of a fluid-driven fracture in a poroelastic medium. Comput Geosci 2015; 19: 1171–1195), where a fully coupled system is considered for the pressure, displacement, and phase field. For the extended system, we follow a similar approach: we introduce, for a given pressure, an energy functional, from which we derive the equations for the displacement and phase field. We establish the existence of a solution of the incremental problem through convergence of a finite-dimensional Galerkin approximation. Furthermore, we construct the corresponding Lyapunov functional, which is related to the free energy. Computational results are provided that demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in treating fluid-driven fracture propagation. Specifically, our numerical findings confirm differences with test cases using the linear Biot equations.