ABSTRACT
Modeling of fluid-driven fractures has been an ongoing effort over the past 50 years, starting with the pioneering work of Khristianovic and Zheltov (1955). This activity has been mainly motivated by hydraulic fracturing, a method widely applied in the petroleum industry to stimulate oil and gas wells. Hence, the main thrust of the modeling effort has been directed towards solving the problem of a “deep” hydraulic fracture in an infinite elastic medium, either homogeneous (Perkins and Kern 1961; Barenblatt 1962; Geertsma and de Klerk 1969; Spence and Sharp 1985) or nonhomogeneous (Wang and Clifton 1990; Siebrits and Peirce 2002).
