From arteries to boreholes: steady-state response of a poroelastic cylinder to fluid injection

Abstract

The radially outward flow of fluid into a porous medium occurs in many practical problems, from transport across vascular walls to the pressurization of boreholes. As the driving pressure becomes non-negligible relative to the stiffness of the solid structure, the poromechanical coupling between the fluid and the solid has an increasingly strong impact on the flow. For very large pressures or very soft materials, as is the case for hydraulic fracturing and arterial flows, this coupling can lead to large deformations and, hence, to strong deviations from a classical, linear-poroelastic response. Here, we study this problem by analysing the steady-state response of a poroelastic cylinder to fluid injection. We consider the qualitative and quantitative impacts of kinematic and constitutive nonlinearity, highlighting the strong impact of deformation-dependent permeability. We show that the wall thickness (thick versus thin) and the outer boundary condition (free versus constrained) play a central role in controlling the mechanics.