The formation of channels in propped fractures, in the presence of fibers, has been demonstrated experimentally under a wide variety of conditions. The presence of channels can have a significant impact on the effective fracture conductivity and consequently the productivity of a given well. While single channels are observed in experiments, a question is how many channels may be present in real proppant packs and how long do they grow? The length is especially importnat when proppant flowback control additives are used as "tail-ins" with the last part of the proppant pack. The complement the experimental study, the understanding of channel propagation and the interaction between multiple growing channels was modeled using finite difference codes.
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