If the energy release rate exceeds a critical value, the crack will grow. In this case, a new FEA simulation is performed (for the next time step) where the node at the crack tip is released. For a bounded substrate, we may simply stop enforcing fixed Dirichlet boundary conditions at the crack tip node of the previous time step (i.e. displacements are no longer restrained). For a symmetric crack, we would need to update the geometry of the domain with a longer crack opening (and therefore generate a new mesh).