Hydraulic Fracturing Mechanics (2D)

This 2D companion strips the same fracking mechanic down to a flat side cross-section: a wellbore drops from the surface, kicks off into a horizontal lateral, and fires perforation clusters along it. Injected fluid pressure must clear the rock's resistance threshold — set by rock type — before a fracture initiates at all; once it does, a branching network fans out from each perforation, its reach and branch density genuine functions of how far pressure exceeds resistance and of the rock's brittleness, exactly as in the 3D wellbore model. Proppant concentration is applied through a saturating-with-overpack-penalty conductivity curve that brightens the network and raises the flow-rate readout, and animated fluid particles trace the same path fluid actually takes: down the wellbore, then out along a randomly assigned fracture branch, looping continuously at a speed set by the pump-rate slider.