Fracture Development Criterion for a Poroelastic Medium

The central idea of the classical fracture growth theory based on the concept of brittle and quasi-brittle fracture developed by A.A. Griffith and G.R. Irwin is a fracture growth criterion. There may be various ways to state this criterion. Depending on the specific problem, each statement may be more or less practical for investigating fracture growth. The main results of this theory are valid for deformable bodies that comply with linear elasticity laws. Since there exist numerous practical applications, generalising these equations to include poroelastic media is of utmost importance. We present a generalisation of the results obtained previously for purely elastic media for the case of deformable Biot poroelastic media. We show that the pressure and stress fields in the vicinity of the fracture tip exhibit singular behaviour in the general case. This allowed us to derive a fracture growth criterion for a poroelastic medium that takes into account the effect of the fluid pressure field in the pores

The study was supported by Russian Science Foundation (project no. 15-11-00021)

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