Evolution of Friction and Permeability in a Propped Fracture under Shear

Figure 9

Evolution of (a) permeability, (b) normalized permeability (with respect to the initial permeability value), and (c) friction for the propped fracture during shearing under different proppant thickness, no proppant, monolayer, double layers, and triple layers with displacement; (d) grain size distributions of proppants before and after the experiments. The confining stress is 3 MPa and proppant size is 40/80 mesh for all cases.

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)