ABSTRACT
659The analysis of fracture of rock or other materials has been developed since the mid 1940s. Although dealing with and exploiting rock fracturing has been a part of mining engineering for hundreds of years, rock fracture mechanics has been developed into an engineering discipline since the mid 1960s. Rock fracture mechanics mainly deals with a thorough understanding of what will happen to the rock formations in the subsurface when subjected to in situ stresses. In the fracturing process of rock, a number of important parameters are to be considered i.e. fracture toughness, in situ stress, Poisson’s ratio, Young’s modulus, etc. It should be noted that rock formations cannot often be treated as isotropic and homogeneous bodies. For example, in the case of hydrocarbon reservoirs, the porous and fluid filled nature of rock requires poroelastic theory for some problems.
Although some of rock fracture mechanics problems can be solved analytically, due to the complexity of these problems, some well sophisticated numerical methods have been developed to cope with the difficulties. The mesh-based numerical methods may include; Finite Element Method (FEM), eXtended Finite Element Method (XFEM), Boundary Element Method (BEM), Displacement Discontinuity Method (DDM), Discrete Element Method (DEM), the combined methods (such as the Combined Finite Discrete Element Method (CFDEM)), etc. In addition to the mesh-reduction methods such as BEM and combined methods; mesh-less interpolation methods are developed to overcome the drawbacks of mesh-based methods. A brief explanation of these numerical methods as applied to the rock fracture mechanics is given.
