Hydraulic fracturing simulation of soils based on XFEM

Hydraulic fracture will have a serious negative impact on the safety of core rockfill dams. Macroscopically, the hydraulic fracture of soils can be regarded as the failure process of further development of local cracks (weak surfaces) under the action of hydraulic wedge splitting. XFEM is a numerical simulation method which can effectively describe cracks. In this study, XFEM combined with the Biot’s consolidation theory is used to deal with the crack element, so that the hydraulic fracturing process of soils is described by both the dispersive crack state and the embedded crack shape. The method is verified by a model example and a practical engineering example of Hyttejuvet dam in Norway. The results of this work are helpful to understand the cause and process of hydraulic fracture of soils, and can be used for fluid-solid coupling failure analysis of soil structures.