SUMMARYWe presented a finite-element-based algorithm to simulate plane-strain, straight hydraulic fractures in an impermeable elastic medium. The algorithm acCOllllts for the nonlinear coupling between the fluid pressure and the crack opening and separately tracks the evolution of the crack tip and the fluid front. It therefore allows the existence of a fluid lag. The fluid front is advanced explicitly in time, but an implicit strategy is needed for the crack tip to guarantee the satisfaction of Griffith's criterion at each time step. We enforced the coupling between the fluid and the rock by simultaneously solving for the pressure field in the fluid and the crack opening at each time step. We provided verification of our algorithm by performing sample simulations and comparing them with two known similarity solutions.

SUMMARYWe formulate a class of delicately controlled problems to model the kink-free evolution of quasistatic cracks in brittle, isotropic, linearly elastic materials in two dimensions. The evolving crack satisfies familiar principles-Griffith's criterion, local symmetry, and irreversibility. A novel feature of the formulation is that in addition to the crack path, the loading is also treated as an unknown. Specifically, a scaling factor for prescribed Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions is computed as part of the solution to yield an always-propagating and ostensibly kink-free crack and a continuous loading history beyond the initial step. A dimensionless statement of the problem depends only on the Poisson's ratio of a homogeneous material, and is in particular, independent of its Young's modulus and fracture toughness.Numerical resolution of the formulated problem relies on two new ideas. The first is an algorithm to compute triangulations conforming to cracked domains by locally deforming a given background mesh in the vicinity of evolving cracks. The algorithm is robust under mild assumptions on the sizes and angles of triangles near the crack and its smoothness. Hence, a subset, if not the entire family, of cracked domains realized during the course of a simulation can be discretized with the same background mesh; we term the latter a universal mesh for such a family of domains. Universal meshes facilitate adopting a discrete representation for the crack (as splines in our examples), preclude the need for local splitting/retriangulation operations, liberate the crack from following directions prescribed by the mesh, and enable the adoption of standard FEMs to compute the elastic fields in the cracked solid. Second, we employ a method specifically designed to approximate the stress intensity factors for curvilinear cracks. We examine the performance of the resulting numerical method with detailed examples, including comparisons with an exact solution of a crack propagating along a circular arc (which we construct) and comparisons with experimental fracture paths. In all cases, we observe convergence of computed paths, their derivatives, and loading histories with refinement of the universal mesh.