Running Many Scenarios Successively

I am using FEFLOW for geothermal modeling. I need to run my model for many different scenarios (like successively change of gradient, heat flux, material parameters etc.); how can I do that in a wise way. I do not want to change the parameters by hand. My idea is to use some loops (for example in MATLAB) that change the parameters.

I think if there would be a way that allows me to open.*fem file in a text editor and edit it I can manage to solve my problem.

I appreciate your response.

Regards,
Pejman 

Dear Pejman,

when saving your results, you may choose the FEM-Interchange (ASCII) format instead of the default binary format. Afterwards, you can open the fem-file with an editor or do an automatic manipulation using external software.

The file format of the fem is described in the "file format library" in the FEFLOW helpm system (press F1 in master menu).

Note that the ASCII-fem-format is not as fast as the binary-fem-format; also the variables are stored with single-precision only (double-precision in binary).

Hey Pejman,

personally, I would stay away from messing around with the FEM file. Once you've read the file specs, you'll pbly understand why.

The "wise way" that I'd rather suggest is using the InferFace Manager (IFM) to create your own data importers (and exporters, if needed). This can be done, so that these importers are called automatically before every flow simulation (PreSimulation) for example. All you need to do then, is manipulate the default input files for those importers externally. This, however, can be done in a much safer way, since you define the format of these input (ASCII) files yourself, and hence you know exactly how to modify the data.

We've used this approach with SensAn, a Sensitivity Analysis tool, that's freely availbale as part of the PEST package. See attached flowchart for details.

Coming from MatLab, you pbly know enough C syntax already. That plus a C compiler is all you need really.

Chris

Hey Alex and Chris,

Thanks a lot!!! and Thanks Chris for the chart!!! I got my answer.....

But Chris do I need C compiler or C++ compiler?... as far as know I have to have C++ compiler...


Cheers,
Pejman

Hey Pejman,

yes, you will need a C++ compiler (I don't think a C compiler will do). However, Microsoft started providing some of its software for free, as what they call their Express versions. You can download Visual C++ Express from

http://www.microsoft.com/express/download/

I haven't used it (we use a licensed version of Visual Studio .Net), but I tried SQL Server Express before and that worked fine.

The trickiest part will pbly be to get the compiler set up correctly. There is a section in the IFM documentation, that describes it, but you might have to adjust that for using Visual C++ Express and the newest version of FeFlow, which saves some shared files in different locations (see my post in "creating module with published source code" in the "IFM and Filter Programming" section). If you can't figure it out (with help from the support team), let me know and I'll see what I can do.

Good luck, Chris