Gas-driven fractures are of practical importance in the stimulation of gas and oil wells, rock blasting with explosives, and the containment of underground explosions. The modeling of the problem requires the coupling of two processes; gas flow and rock fracture. Much work has been done on the formulation of the problem, however, the numerical solution of the resulting equations are far from satisfactory. Recent advances in computer graphics have made addressing these problems much more tractable. It is now possible to modify the computational mesh describing the instantaneous fracture surface during the computation using interactive graphics. An efficient approach will be to develope automatic remeshing schemes for the more common situations and to rely on the user for unusual cases. Limiting special cases leads to robust remeshing algorithms. The goal of this Engineering Initiation project will be to couple the rock fracture finite element code with the gas flow pressure computations and develope an interactive algorithm to simulate gas well explosions as an example problem. The institutional support is adequate and the P.I. is well experienced in the development of computational algorithms. I strongly recommend support.
