The principal objective of the Open Porous Media (OPM) initiative is to develop a simulation suite that is capable of modeling industrially and scientifically relevant flow and transport processes in porous media and bridge the gap between the different application areas of porous media modeling, including reservoir mechanics, CO2 sequestration, biological systems, and product development of engineered media.
The OPM initiative will provide a long-lasting, efficient, and well-maintained, open-source software for flow and transport in porous media built on modern software principles. The resulting software should:
have functionality supporting multiple application areas
handle industrially relevant cases
be easy to extend with new functionality
be built on open source code principles
have a relatively low user threshold
The OPM initiative is based on a collaborative effort of several research groups, each having a different research focus, and will mainly target developers and advanced users of new modelling schemes and computational methodologies within academia and industry. Graphical user interfaces and integrated work flows will be given more attention when a sufficiently wide user-base has been established.
The suite will be released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) software license, which is the most popular license for free software. The motivation is to provide a means to unite industry and public research on simulation of flow and transport in porous media. For academic users, we seek to provide a software infrastructure that facilitates testing of new ideas on models with industrystandard complexity, while at the same time giving the researcher control over discretisation and solvers. Similarly, we aim to accelerate the technology transfer from academic institutions to professional companies by making new research results available as free software of professional standard.
The idea of an open-source simulator suite for flow and tranport in porous media was initially set forth by Dr. Alf Birger Rustad at the StatoilHydro Research Center, Trondheim. The OPM initiative is initially supported by five research groups in Norway and Germany. Based on existing grants from public research agencies and funding from StatoilHydro, the five research groups will make the first steps towards developing the OPM simulation suite. However, a full-scale development of the OPM initiative requires substantially more funding and involvement of more research groups and potential end users.