a b s t r a c tHydraulic fracturing is widely accepted and applied to improve the gas recovery in unconventional reservoirs. Unconventional reservoirs to be addressed here are with very low permeability, complicated geological settings and in-situ stress field etc. All of these make the hydraulic fracturing process a challenging task. In order to effectively and economically recover gas from such reservoirs, the initiation and propagation of hydraulic fracturing in the heterogeneous fractured/ porous media under such complicated conditions should be mastered. In this paper, some issues related to hydraulic fracturing have been reviewed, including the experimental study, field study and numerical simulation. Finally the existing problems that need to be solved on the subject of hydraulic fracturing have been proposed.Unconventional gas mainly includes shale gas, tight gas and coal seam gas. Shale gas is commonly in mudstone, shale and between them the interlayers of sandstone. Tight gas often has been stored in tight sandstone or sometimes limestone. Coal bed methane is contained within coal seams. Their common attribute is that the permeability of the matrix is very low, and the permeability often has been improved by artificial or natural fractures [55]. However, the differences between them are also significant. For example, the effective shale thickness for gas production should be more than 15 m while the height of coal is generally from 0.6 m to 5.0 m [68], as coal seams to be fractured may be multiple and thin, hydraulic fracturing in coal needs to be more accurately designed and controlled. Moreover, the Young's modulus of coal is smaller than shale and tight sandstone, the permeability of coal is more sensitive to stress due to the development of cleat system, and leakoff in coal may be more severe, which can significantly affect the fracturing result. Due to the complexity of unconventional reservoirs, it is challenging to predict the initiation and propagation of hydraulic fractures [39]. For example, the complex in situ stress state and distribution of rocks of varied attributes, which may change the profile of hydraulic fractures [38]; the existence of arbitrary pre-existing interfaces may diversify or arrest hydraulic fractures [93]; the temperature effect [75]; the fluid loss and transport of proppant; the competition between hydraulic fractures, and its recession and closure [4]. Thus, it is crucial to explore how hydraulic fracturing process will happen in complex geological settings.Firsthand materials of hydraulic fracturing come from in-door experiments, and field study. Laboratory study undergoes from small-scale rock samples with several cubic centimetres to large ones with one cubic metre or more. Since it is easy to control the stress conditions and make artificial structures within samples, hydraulic fracturing process with different stress field and rock structures can be conveniently studied. Especially in large scale experiments, it is possible to build a full size borehole, or to contr...

[1] Dynamic simulations of homogeneous, heterogeneous and bimaterial fault rupture using modified slip-weakening frictional laws with static restrengthening are presented giving rise to both crack-like and pulse-like rupture. We demonstrate that pulse-like rupture is possible by making a modification of classical slip-weakening friction to include static restrengthening. We employ various slip-weakening frictional laws to examine their effect on the resulting earthquake rupture speed, size and mode. More complex rupture characteristics were produced with more strongly slip-weakening frictional laws, and the degree of slip-weakening had to be finely tuned to reproduce realistic earthquake rupture characteristics. Rupture propagation on a fault is controlled by the constitutive properties of the fault. We provide benchmark tests of our method against other reported solutions in the literature. We demonstrate the applicability of our elastoplastic fault model for modeling dynamic rupture and wave propagation in fault systems, and the rich array of dynamic properties produced by our elastoplastic finite element fault model. These are governed by a number of model parameters including: the spatial heterogeneity and material contrast across the fault, the fault strength, and not least of all the frictional law employed. Asymmetric bilateral fault rupture was produced for the bimaterial case, where the degree of material contrast influenced the rupture speed in the different propagation directions.

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SUMMARYA new approach to the automatic generation of a quadrilateral mesh with arbitrary line constraints is proposed in this paper. It is an indirect all-quad mesh generation and presented in the following steps: (1) discretizing the constrained lines within the domain; (2) converting the above domain to a triangular mesh together with the line constraints; (3) transforming the generated triangular mesh with line constraints to an all-quad mesh through performing an advancing front algorithm from the line constraints, which enables the construction of quadrilaterals layer by layer, and roughly keeps the feature of the initial triangular mesh; (4) optimizing the topology of the quadrilateral mesh to reduce the number of irregular nodes; (5) smoothing the generated mesh toward high-quality all-quad mesh generation. Finally, a few application examples are given to demonstrate the reliability and usefulness of the proposed algorithm.

SUMMARYEarthquakes have been recognized as resulting from a stick-slip frictional instability along the faults between deformable rocks. An arbitrarily-shaped contact element strategy, named the node-to-point contact element strategy, is proposed, applied with the static-explicit characters to handle the friction contact between deformable bodies with stick and finite frictional slip and extended here to simulate the active faults in the crust with a more general nonlinear friction law. An efficient contact search algorithm for contact problems among multiple small and finite deformation bodies is also introduced. Moreover, the efficiency of the parallel sparse solver for the nonlinear friction contact problem is investigated. Finally, a model for the plate movement in the north-east zone of Japan under gravitation is taken as an example to be analyzed with different friction behaviors.