  Fluid injection and production cause changes in reservoir pressure, which
result in deformations in the subsurface. This phenomenon is particularly
important in reservoirs with abundant fractures and faults because the induced
slip and opening of the fractures may significantly alter their hydraulic
properties. Modeling strongly coupled poro-mechanical processes in naturally
fractured reservoirs is a challenging problem. The Discrete Fracture Model
(DFM) is a state-of-art method for modeling coupled flow and mechanics in
fractured reservoirs. This method requires constructing computational grids
that comform to fractures, which is very challenging in complex 3D settings.
The objective of this study is to develop a numerical method that does not
require gridding near fractures and can efficiently model hydromechanical
interactions in fractured reservoirs. We utilize formulations based on the
Strong Discontinuity Approach (SDA) for mechanics and Embedded Discrete
Fracture Model (EDFM) for flow. We first present a mathematical formulation and
emphasize the kinematic aspects of fracture slip and opening. We then introduce
a series of mechanical tests that investigate the spatial convergence of the
model and compare its accuracy with the Discrete Fracture Model (DFM). We
finally consider a synthetic coupled case of a reservoir with several fractures
and compare the performance of the SDA and DFM methods. Our results indicate
super-linear spatial convergence of the proposed SDA algorithm. Numerical
simulations confirm the applicability of the proposed method to modeling the
coupling effects in subsurface applications.
