A constitutive and numerical model for mechanical compaction in

sedimentary basins

Denise Bernaud, Luc Dormieux & Samir Maghous

Ecole National des Ponts et Chausses, Champs-sur-Marne, France

ABSTRACT: The aim of the paper is to provide new elements concerning the constitutive behavior of sed-
imentary rocks and the numerical aspects for basin simulators. The mechanical model is developed within
the framework of finite poroplasticity. Special attention is paid to the effects of large porosity changes on the
poromechanical properties of the sediment. A simplified micromechanics-based approach is used to account for
the stiffness increase and hardening induced by large plastic strains. The numerical method is inspired from the
deactivation-reactivation method used for the simulation of excavation processes. Periods of sediments accretion
are simulated by progressive activation of the gravity forces within a fictitious closed system. The influence of per-
meability and that of the accretion ratio on the compaction law, the porosity and pore pressure profiles are exam-
ined. In particular, the importance to take into account the coupling between porosity changes and permeability
is emphasized. Cam-Clay inspired hardening laws are shown to yield negative porosities at high compaction
levels. These limitation are solved by means of the hardening law derived from the micromechanical reasoning.

1 INTRODUCTION (Bourgeois and Dormieux 1997) and (Deud et al.

Simulation of sedimentary basins is a complex mul-
tidisciplinary problem involving geological, chemical
and mechanical aspects. Reconstructing the stress and
deformation history of a sedimentary basin is a chal-
lenging and important problem in geoscience. The
potential applications include petroleum exploration,
reserve assessment and production.
Disregarding chemical aspects, the basic models of
mechanical compaction are still based on phenomeno-
logical relationships relating porosity to effective ver-
tical stress. The concept of porosity versus Terzaghis
effective stress dependence has been early introduced
by (Hubert and Rubey 1959) and later by (Smith 1971).
These ideas have been widely adopted and imple-
mented in numerical finite element models that have
yielded valuable contributions to the understanding of
the evolution of sedimentary basins.
Still, a more comprehensive description of the
mechanics involved in basin simulation should be
achieved within the tensorial formalism of the con-
stitutive model. To deal with, the main difficulty
rises from the large porosity changes involved in
compaction problem. This requires that the porome-
chanical constitutive law be formulated in the frame-
work of finite irreversible strains (Tuncay et al. 2000)
2004).
The coupled nature of the deformation problem may
be understood as follows. Large strains modify the
microstructure, microstructure modifications lead to
a change in the poromechanical properties of the sedi-
ment material, which in turn affect the basin response.
Theoretical formulation accounting for the effects of
the microstructure changes on the elastic and plastic
properties of the porous material have been proposed
in (Dormieux and Maghous 2000) (Bernaud et al.
2002) (Barthlmy et al. 2003).
A large part of this work is devoted to the numeri-
cal aspects of basin simulations. It is well known that
dealing with open material systems like sedimentary
basins in the framework of finite element procedures
in a strongly non-linear context is not an easy task.
A specific computational technique is developed for
this purpose. The technique is widely inspired of the
so-called deactivation-reactivation method used for
thesimulation of excavation process and lining place-
ment in tunnel engineering (Hanafy and Emery 1980)
(Bernaud et al. 1995).
The present paper is mainly divided into three parts:
(1) the micromechanics-based constitutive model for
the sedimentary basins is described within the finite
poroplasticity framework; (2) the numerical procedure

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is briefly presented; (3) some examples of numerical elementary volume, defined as the ratio between its
simulations are given. volume in the current configuration and its initial one.
The plastic part p of the lagrangian porosity is defined
as the lagrangian porosity in the unloaded configura-
2 CONSTITUTIVE EQUATIONS tion of the elementary volume. Similarly, the plastic
part J p of the jacobian is defined as the jacobian in
At the scale of the pores and solid grains, large strains this unloaded configuration. Note that the rates J and
J are given by
p
modify the microstructure of the sediment material.
In turn, these microstructural changes are responsi-
ble for the evolution of elastic and plastic mechanical
properties.
The sedimentary rock is modelled as a fully sat- With these notations, the rate form of the second state
urated poroelastoplastic material undergoing large equation reads (Bernaud et al. 2002):
strains. The anisotropy of the mechanical properties
of the sedimentary material induced by compaction is
disregarded. The elastic part of the deformation gra-
dient of the skeleton particles is assumed to remain
infinitesimal. This means that large strains involved
during compaction process are of irreversible (plastic)
nature. M is the Biot modulus. The terms involving M and b
In the framework of finite poroplasticity, the con- in (3) are related to the influence of large plastic strains
stitutive behavior comprises two state equations in on the poroelastic properties.
rate-type formulation together with complementary The complementary equations prescribe the plastic
relations specifying the flow rule (Dormieux and flow rule. Generalizing the concept of plastic poten-
Maghous 2000) (Bernaud et al. 2002). Let denote tial, we therefore introduce the function g(, p) which
the Cauchy stress tensor and p the pore pressure. The derivatives yield the sought plastic rates :
first state equation relates the stress rate , the pore
pressure rate p , and the strain rate tensor d defined as
the symmetric part of the velocity gradient.

The plastic incompressibility of the solid phase is

assumed in the sequel. This implies that the plastic
part of the pore volume change is identical to the plas-
where d p denotes the plastic strain rate while  is the
rotation (spin) rate tensor which aims at taking the
large rotation of the elementary volume into account.
This equation involves:
a rotational time derivative of the Biot effective
= + p1 (Bourgeois et al.
stress tensor
e = + b p 1, where b is the Biot 1995):
coefficient; .
a term related to the particulate derivative c of the
tensor of drained elastic moduli c . The evolution
of the elastic properties is related to those of the
microstructure which cannot be neglected in the
domain of large strains.
Relationship (1) extends classical rate form formu-
lations to the case of variable elastic properties.
The second state equation relates the pore volume
change to the rate p of the pore pressure and to the
strain rate d. In view of its derivation, it is conve-
tic part of the total volume change and yields p = J .
p
Owing to (2), it is further obtained that = J trd .
p p p
Combining this equation with (4) reveals that the plas-
tic potential depends on and through the so-called
Terzaghi effective stress
The relevancy of the above model depends on the
capability to specify:
1. the elasticity-plasticity coupling characterized by
the dependence of tensor c as well as of poroelastic
b coefficients M on large plastic strains;
2. the influence of large plastic strains on the evolution
of the yield surface as well as on the hardening rule.
nient to introduce normalize the pore volume dpore In the case of plastic incompressibility of the solid
the so-called lagrangian porosity = dpore /do that matrix, large plastic strains of the porous material are
is related to the classical porosity (defined as the expected to induce significant porosity and pore shape
pore volume fraction in the current configuration) by changes. In order to capture the influence of the plas-
= J . J is the jacobian of the transformation of the tic strains on the poroelastic properties, the idea is to

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Copyright 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK
resort to micromechanical estimates of the latter. For
the sake of simplicity, the anisotropy induced during
the loading process is disregarded in this study. The
pore space is therefore entirely characterized by its vol-
ume fraction, namely the porosity . We herein adopt
the Hashin-Shtrikman upper bounds which are known
to reasonably model the elastic properties of isotropic
porous media. Accordingly, the bulk K and shear
moduli of the porous medium now appear as func-
tions of the porosity as well as of the elastic properties
of the solid phase k s and s (that are assumed to be
constant):
It is recalled that the Biot coefficient and modulus are
connected to K through
We now need to relate the porosity change to the plastic
strains undergone by the porous material. Combin-
ing the condition of plastic incompressibility of the
solid constituent, which writes J p p = 1 o (o pore space vanishes (J p J 1 o ). This is the way
is the initial value of the porosity), with the assump-
tion of infinitesimal elastic strains, which allows the
approximations J p J and p , one obtains
In view of (8), equations (6) show that the macro-
scopic stiffness tensor c is a function of the (total or
plastic) jacobian : c = c (J p ). The same conclusion
holds for the poroelastic coefficients b and M . Neglect-
ing the induced anisotropy therefore amounts to the
fact that the elasticity-plasticity coupling properties is
only governed by the volumetric plastic strains.
As regards the evolution of the plastic properties
of the porous medium, it is first assumed the yield
surface f is that of the standard modified Cam-Clay
(Wood 1990):
where s = 1/3tr is the deviatoric stress ten- mentary basins lies in the fact that the system under
sor, p
= 1/3tr
is the mean effective stress. pc is consideration is an open system because of the con-
the consolidation pressure and represents the harden-
ing parameter of the model. The constant Mcs is the
slope of the critical state line. The plastic flow rule is
associated, i.e. G = f .
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Copyright 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK
A simple way to generalize the classical hardening
law in the Cam-Clay model consists in adopting
However, such a hardening law does not enforce the
condition J p > 1 o , corresponding to total pore clo-
sure (see (8)). It is therefore expected that a simple
extension of the classical Cam-Clay hardening law in
the form (10) might yield negative porosities under
high isotropic compression. That is of course not sat-
isfactory. Instead of (10), we shall hereafter resort to a
micromechanical approach to the hardening law which
overcomes the above difficulty. The idea is to identify
pc (J p ) to the limit load of a hollow sphere subjected to
isotropic compression in the domain of large strains.
In fact, as early noticed by Hashin, the hollow sphere is
the simplest conceptual model for an isotropic porous
medium. Considering the case of a solid phase of the
Tresca type, the limit load appears to be a function of
the current porosity (Deud et al. 2004):
As opposed to (10), we note that the consolidation pres-
sure predicted by (11) tends towards infinity when the
this micromechanics-based hardening law avoids the
development of negative porosities.
Furthermore, it is possible to show that the dominat-
ing hardening mechanism at large strains is associated
with large geometry change, and not with the increase
of trapped elastic energy as in the framework of small
strains analysis (Barthlmy et al. 2003).
As regards the permeability tensor k = k1 of the
sediment material, effects of microstructural changes
on the evolution of k may be modeled by means of the
Kozeny-Carman formula:
ko = k(o ) is the initial value of the permeability.
3 NUMERICAL PROCEDURE FOR
SEDIMENTARY BASINS SIMULATION
The specificity of the numerical simulation of sedi-
tinuous sediment supply. The numerical approach
developed in this paper, which is aimed to simulate
the time evolution of the basin boundary, is based upon
a technique directly inspired from tunnel engineering
and may be easily incorporated within existing finite fluid mass exchange associated with the pore pres-
element tools. sure dissipation). The system is termed here as closed
For simplicity, the basin undergoing compaction because the corresponding finite element grid com-
is modeled as an horizontal infinite layer. The base- prises a constant number of finite elements and nodes.
ment rock is located at z = 0. Assuming it remains
horizontal, the upper boundary is defined by the time
dependent plane equation z = H (t), where H (t) refers
to the total thickness of the basin at time t. Besides,
the sea level is located at the plane z = Lo H (t). In
absence of tectonic activity, the gravity forces g ez
and the fluid pressure at the top of the basin constitute
The geometrical domain o is regarded as the initial
configuration of the fictitious system material whose
constituent is defined as follows: mass density = p f ,
permeability = |k|  ko , poroelastic and poroplastic
parameters equal to those of the sediment material in
its reference state. The initial stress and fluid pressure
fields correspond to hydrostatic state. The spatial dis-
the loading parameters in the compaction process. The
accretion rate M d (t) is considered as given. The bound-
ary conditions consist in prescribing the values of the
stress vector T = ez , displacement vector , fluid
pressure p and fluid flux q ez
cretization of o is carried out as follows. The time
interval of study is subdivided into n sub-intervals
[ti1 , ti ], with to = 0 and tn = T . During the time incre-
ment ti = ti ti1 , the dump of sediments would
correspond (if the material were rigid) to the thickness
increase Hi of the basin. The geometrical domain
z = H (t) (upper surface)
z = 0 (basin basement)
The key idea of the numerical technique consists in
transforming the real open material system (the basin)
into a fictitious closed system. The evolution in time
of the latter must of course correspond to that of the
real system. The main advantage of this procedure lies
in the fact that the finite element approach such as that
developed in (Bernaud et al. 2002) is applicable.
The principle is inspired from the so-called deacti-
vation/ reactivationmethod (Hanafy and Emery 1980)
o is subdivided into n layers of thickness Hi , each
one being discretized using for instance triangular ele-
ments (6 nodes for the displacement approximation, 3
nodes for the pressure approximation).
The issue consists in determining the evolution of
the fictitious closed system material as the sediment
is supplied and the layers (F.E. grid) deform with the
compaction process. As mentioned above, the sedi-
ment layers are activated as they added by setting their
physical parameters to those of the real material in its
reference state.
j j
The layer i is defined by Hi1 z Hi , where
j
z = Hi refers to the current (i.e. at time tj ) position of
the material plane located initially at z = Hi . The geo-
metrical volume occupied by the (fictitious) porous
(Bernaud et al. 1995). This technique was initially
developed and implemented for numerical simulation
in tunnel engineering (simulation of excavation pro-
cess and lining placement). The idea consists here
in activating sediment layers as they are effectively
deposited by substituting their fluid characteristics
with material sediment ones. This process amounts to
a stepwise activation of the gravity forces in the upper
layers.
More precisely, let us assume that the simulation
of the basin formation is carried out during the time
interval t [0, T ]. We hence introduce the geometrical
material at time tj is denoted as j :
If i j, the layer i has already been activated and
the mechanical properties are those of the sediment
material in the current state, since they evolved with
compaction from time ti of activation.
In contrast, if i > j, the layer i is not activated yet
and the mechanical properties correspond to those
of the initial fictitious configuration.
domain o defined by 0 z H, where
The local fields at time tj are the solutions to successive
finite poroplastic boundary value problems performed
during time intervals [ti1 , ti ].

o (t) = (H (t), t) is the mass density of the sediment

material in the reference state. Actually, H represents Comments
the thickness of the basin at time T if the constitutive
material were rigid. It is assumed that no additional
sediments are deposited and no erosional phenomena
take place beyond time T . Consequently, the system
evolves as a closed system for t > T (except for the
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Copyright 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK
The geometrical domain o to be discretized has
a bounded extension in the x and z directions.
Appropriate boundary conditions imposed on the
lateral sides depend on the problem nature (one-
dimensional compaction, tectonic loading, ...).
 6000 0.8

0.6
4000

porosity
H(t) (m)

0.4

2000 (a1)
(a) (a2)
(b) 0.2 (b1)
(b2)

0 0
0 500 1000 1500
0 2000 4000 6000
t (million years) depth (m)

Figure 1. Compaction curves. (a) ko = 1010 MPa1 m2 s1 ; Figure 2. Porosity profiles. (a1 ) ko = 1010 MPa1 m2 s1 ,
(b) ko = 109 MPa1 m2 s1 . t = T ; (a2 ) ko = 1010 MPa1 m2 s1 , t = 2T ; (b1 ) ko =
109 MPa1 m2 s1 , t = T ; (b2 ) ko = 109 MPa1 m2 s1 ,
Each layer is subdivided into finite elements. The t = 2T .
time increment tj corresponding to the activa-
tion (supply) of layer j is itself subdivided into 100
time sub-increment in order to better capture the
hydromecanical evolution of the basin. (a)
The numerical procedure has been described assum- (b)
80
ing that the layers remain horizontal (i.e. 1D com-
pore pressure (MPa)

paction). However, its applicability goes far beyond

this particular situation, and the layers may deform
60
according to the loading process.
Periods of non-deposition and erosional events are
simulated in the same way. For example, the simu-
lation of a phase of erosion consists in progressive 40
deactivation of layers already deposited by set-
ting their poromechanical properties to those of the
non-activated layers (i.e. f , |k|  ko , . . .). 20
0 2000 4000 6000
depth (m)

Figure 3. Pore pressure profiles at t = T . (a) ko =

4 ILLUSTRATIVE BASIN SIMULATIONS 1010 MPa1 m2 s1 ; (b) ko = 109 MPa1 m2 s1 .

The basin deformation model described in the previous

sections has been implemented in a two-dimensional
and pressure profiles. The higher the permeability, the
finite element code. The results presented below illus-
lower the overpressure and the denser the saturated
trate some aspects of basin response in the case of
porous rock.
one-dimensional compaction process.
Figure 1 is related to the compaction law, that is
The following material parameters are fixed:
the time evolution of the basin thickness. The porosity
o = 1.37 103 kg/m3 and o = 0.72, p f = 103 kg/m3 ,
profile along the basin is depicted in Figure 2 for t = T
initial Young modulus Eo = 103 Mpa, initial Poissons
and 2T . Finally, the pore pressure profiles at t = T are
ratio o = 0.33, bo = 0.9715, Mo = 1.392 105 MPa,
represented in 3.
Mcs = 1.2, ko = 1010 or 109 MPa1 m2 s1 ,
pco = 1.5 MPa, the accretion rate M d = 2.05 109 kg/s
per unit area, H = 6000 m corresponding to T  60
million years. 5 CONCLUSIONS
Some of the results obtained from the numeri-
cal simulations are given in the figures below. They A constitutive model has been formulated for sedi-
emphasize the significant influence of the initial per- mentary material. It aims at incorporating some of
meability on the compaction curve and on the porosity the fundamentals coupled phenomena involved in the

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Copyright 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK
process of basin compaction by means of a simpli-
fied micro-to-macro framework. The magnitude of
porosity changes induced by compaction imposes
to adopt the framework of finite poroplasticity. The
derived model is able to account for the stiffness
increase and for the hardening induced by large plastic
strains through the corresponding variation of the pore
volume. An important feature of this model is that the
expression of the hardening law avoids development of
negative porosities that are encountered with classical
models of the Cam-Clay type.
From a numerical point of view, a finite element
formulation using the updated Lagrangian scheme is
implemented in order to analyze the time dependent
large deformation of the poroplastic basin. It is empha-
sized that the geometrical non linearity induced by
large strains does not allow to neglect the geometry
change between the two configurations reached by
the system at t and t + t respectively. The numer-
ical analysis takes into account the variations of the
mechanical and hydraulic properties of the material
with the porosity change during compaction. A numer-
ical approach to the process of sediment accretion
has been proposed: its principle consists in activating-
deactivating the sub-layers.
These theoretical and numerical developments have
been implemented in a finite element code. Several
numerical basin simulations have been performed in
a one-dimensional setting, illustrating the ability of
the approach to account for the different couplings
(hydromechanical coupling, elastic-plastic coupling,
hardening-porosity change coupling) involved in such
a problem.
To finish with, let us review some issues that still
need to be addressed: 1) the chemical compaction due
to pressure solution phenomena should be taken into
account in the constitutive equations ; 2) the anisotropy
induced by compaction ; 3) more efficient numeri-
cal techniques is needed in order to deal with larger
degrees of freedom, particularly for three-dimensional
simulations.
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