Hydraulic fracturing (HF) is widely used to enhance the production of oil/gas in the petroleum industry. With the recent advances in HF technology, it also lays a foundation for commercially viable extraction of oil/gas from deep-buried shale formations. Furthermore, HF is expected to play a key role in future energy exploitation, such as the promising deep geo-thermal energy.

However, the HF practice in unconventional oil/gas extraction has already brought controversy due to concerns about the contamination of groundwater resources, induced seismicity, etc. Several questions need to be addressed if we want to use HF effectively and in an eco-friendly manner, including the initiation, propagation, and coalescence of cracks, the thermo-hydro-mechanical-chemical (THMC) coupling behaviors of host rocks, the mechanism of induced seismicity, and its mitigation measures. Thus, reliable and efficient numerical methods of simulating the development of a fracture system, and the use of these numerical models to guide the locating, drilling, and pressuring wells are essential.

This Special Issue aims to highlight the state-of-the-art numerical simulation methods related to hydraulic fracturing. Original research and review articles are welcome.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Advanced numerical methods to simulate crack propagation and crack branching
• Multiscale and multiphysics coupling behaviors of host rocks
• Advanced multiscale modeling methods such as discrete element modeling, peridynamics, and meshless methods
• Advanced signal processing methods related to acoustic emission events
• Advanced application methods for mitigation of induced seismicity
• New algorithms to quantitively depict the micro-structures of rocks
• The stochasticity and uncertainties of numerical parameters and their influence on the accuracy of simulations
• Analytical methods to evaluate the contamination of groundwater resources during hydraulic fracturing