Crack growth in hydraulic rock fracturing

Abstract

Various mining processes involve the injection of liquid under pressure into existing or newlyproduced points; examples are hydraulic fracturing in oil, fracturing in coal seams, and oil displacement at elevated pressures [1, 2]. Studies have been made [3, 4] of vertical and horizontal crack growth in response to a noninfiltrating liquid. In those cases, the actual pressure distribution in a joint was replaced by the statically equivalent uniform pressure on part of the joint surface. Here we propose a treatment that handles such topics reasonably effectively and does not involve the assumption of uniform pressure distribution. A system of equations has been derived for a vertical symmetrical crack to define the Cauchy problem for the crack volume. The quasistatic equilibrium condition for the crack and the solution are very much simplified if a system of mobile elliptical coordinates related to the crack is used. An analogous approach has been used in examining the growth of a circular horizontal crack.