Acoustic Monitoring of Hydraulic Fracture Propagation in Pre-Fractured Natural Rocks

Active acoustic monitoring can capture two types of fracture behavior in rock samples, opening and closure of an existing fracture and tip movement of a propagating fracture. The first type is related to wave transmission across the fracture interface. The second one is related to the travel times of waves that diffract at the fracture tip. A series of experiment has been conducted with an acoustic system that has transducers mounted on the loading frames of a tri-axial cell situated in the Rock Mechanics Laboratory, TUDelft, the Netherlands. The existing fractures are formed by cleaving the rock samples into layers and putting them back together. The propagating fractures were created by hydraulic fracturing via bore-hole injection. The tests in this study featured both cleaved and hydraulic fractures, and aimed to characterize the interaction between them. This paper focus on the data processing that is adapted to these special tests and comparison between the monitored and recovered fractures.