Events

Dr. Arash Dahi-Taleghani, Assistant Professor, Louisiana State University, will give a talk entitled "Failure Models from Different Perspectives for Application in Petroleum Geomechanics Problems" as part of the Claude R. Hocott Graduate Seminar Series.

Bio: Arash Dahi-Taleghani is an assistant professor in the department of Petroleum Engineering at the Louisiana State University (LSU). He is conducting research on geomechanical aspects of underground blowout, zonal fractures at injector wells, mechanistic modeling of hydraulic fractures, microseismicity and geothermal engineering. Arash has a PhD in Petroleum Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and is a registered engineer in the state of Texas. He earned his BS in Civil engineering and MS in Structural mechanics and material both from Sharif University of Technology.

Abstract:

In this talk, we review different petroleum engineering problems that involve rock failure, and explore the most appropriate failure models. From petroleum engineering aspect, wellbore integrity failure may have dramatic environmental and economic consequences, on the other hand, maintaining effective rate of rock destruction is quite important for drilling, hydraulic fracturing and acidization treatments. While rock failure have been studied for more than a century in civil engineering literature, due to the different nature of rock mechanics problems involved in petroleum engineering applications like high pore fluid pressure, poroelastic effects or pressure sensitive mechanical behavior of the rock, reviewing these models and identifying their limitations would be helpful to achieve more reliable predictions. For instance, in failure analysis of most engineering structures, failure initiation is of primary importance while containment of failure in wellbore integrity problems or hydraulic fracturing problems is even more important. While linear elastic fracture mechanics looks sufficient for some applications, there are situations that larger fracturing process zone or dominant role of microfractures may require nonlinear fracture mechanics to perform more realistic analyses. In extreme cases, fracture models will not provide laboratory data, and we need to resort to damage models to fill this gap. The economic importance of these models are buried in preventing underground blowout, achieving high rate of penetration in drilling soft formations, and maintaining high injection rate in waterflooding project in unconsolidated formations.