Plane-Strain Propagation of a Fluid-Driven Crack in a Permeable Rock with Fracture Toughness

A solution to the problem of a plane-strain fluid-driven crack propagation in elastic permeable rock with resistance to fracture is presented. The fracture is driven by injection of an incompressible Newtonian fluid at a constant rate. The solution, restricted to the case of zero lag between the fluid front and the fracture tip, evolves from the early-time regime when the fluid flow takes place mostly inside the crack toward the large-time response when most of the injected fluid is leaking from the crack into the surrounding rock. This transition further depends on a time-invariant partitioning between the energy expanded to overcome the rock fracture toughness and the energy dissipated in the viscous fluid flow in the fracture. A numerical approach is used to compute the solution for the normalized crack length and crack opening and net-fluid pressure profiles as a function of two dimensionless parameters: the leak-off/storage evolution parameter and the toughness/viscosity number. Relation of this solution to the various available asymptotic solutions is discussed. Obtained mapping of the solution onto the problem parametric space has a potential to simplify the tasks of design, modeling, and data inversion for hydraulic fracturing treatments and laboratory experiments.