ResFrac supports pre-existing fractures: explicitly meshed fractures defined before stimulation begins. They serve several distinct purposes.
Pre-existing fractures can represent geological features such as natural fractures or faults, allowing the simulator to capture their influence on fracture propagation, fluid flow, and production.
They can also improve simulation efficiency. Rather than re-running the full fracturing process for offset parent wells or previously completed stages, you can represent their resulting fractures as pre-existing features. This can help capture depletion effects without the computational cost of simulating each frac job. The same approach applies to long-lateral scenarios, such as in geothermal studies.