MRST - Transforming research on reservoir simulation

MRST is provided as a self-contained archive file: either as a Unix-style TAR file compressed with GZip (.tar.gz) or as a ZIP archive (.zip). The archive can be extracted from within MATLAB using the untar or unzip functions. The MRST developers recommend extracting the archive to a subdirectory of your user's home directory. Using unzip, this would be a command like

  unzip mrst-2020a.zip

which would create a new directory mrst-2020a in your current working directory. Once MRST has been extracted to some directory, you must navigate MATLAB there, either using the builtin file browser, or by using the cd command,

On Linux/Mac OS,

    cd /home/username/mrst-2020a/

or on Windows,

    cd C:\Users\username\mrst-2020a\

Assuming that the files were extracted to the home directory. The startup.m file must then be run to activate MRST,

    startup;

Alternatively, if do not want to navigate to the MRST root directory, for instance in an automated script, you can call startup directly

    run /home/username/mrst-2020a/startup

You will then see a welcome message that starts with "Welcome to the Matlab Reservoir Simulation Toolbox (MRST)!"

To verify that MRST is active, you can run a simple example, for example by writing 'flowSolverTutorial1' (the example is named 'gravityColumn' for versions prior to MRST 2016a). A simple gravity pressure problem should be solved and plotted.

Please note that MRST is only activated for your current Matlab/Octave session. You will have to repeat the startup function when starting a new session. MRST does not permanently modify your path or Matlab installation.

We also have a Jolt tutorial that goes through the process of getting MRST up and running:

How to download and getting started with MRST

We aim to be compatible with the free software alternative to Matlab, GNU Octave. Octave has had greatly improved support for many of the key language features used in MRST over the last few years. The AD solvers work in Octave, as do the compiled linear solvers. 3D visualization is also supported, but the graphical user interfaces are not. https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/

We recommend Octave 5.2.0 and newer. You may need the Octave compatibility module for MRST.

The MRST User Guide is a freely available book, released as open access. The book describes most aspects of MRST from both a practical and a mathematical perspective. Please see our documentation page. In addition, there are several other sources of documentation:

• Example scripts - the core module offers a set of example scripts located in the subdirectory 'examples' that describe grid generation and basic one-phase and two-phase solvers. Some of these example scripts are available on the tutorial pages.
• Module examples - many of the modules contain a set of scripts (located in the subdirectory 'examples' of the module) that outline functionality provided in the module. Some of these examples are available on the module overview pages. You can also use the "mrstExample" function to see the available examples. "mrstExamples ad-core" will list all examples in the ad-core module.
• Manual pages for individual routines - all routines in MRST are documented using a style similar to standard Matlab that describes synopsis, input/output parameters, and how the routine works. In most cases, the documentation also offers simple examples of usage and list related routines.
• The source code itself - all parts of MRST are available as open source code. However, MRST is a research tool that was developed primary to provide a flexible development platform, and some parts of the software may admittedly be quite hard to digest for those unfamiliar with our way of writing efficient Matlab.

MRST is, as the name implies, a toolbox that contains many of the features associated with reservoir simulators such as visualization, solvers, and grid processing/generation, but it is not a stand-alone/black-box simulator. It assumes that the user is comfortable working "under the hood" and knows how to choose the right tools for the right job. For running an Eclipse-type input file directly, we suggest you take a look at the "simulateSPE1" example under ad-blackoil for a minimal working example of this.

MRST has a large number of different solvers. We list a few of the major categories:

• ad-blackoil: fully-implicit solvers for up to three phases (water, oil, gas) with support for both immiscible and blackoil type flow (dissolved gas / vaporized oil).
• compositional: K-value or equation-of-state multi-component flow. Up to three phases, with the third phase assumed to be a "simple" water phase only made up of H₂O.
• co2lab: Solvers specialized for the simulation of geological storage of CO₂. Includes many types of vertical-equilibrium formulations (sequential schemes, fully-implicit schemes)
• ad-mechanics: Coupled mechanics and flow. Uses the Virtual Element Method.
• blackoil-sequential: Sequential variations of the fully implicit solvers in the ad-blackoil and compositional modules.
• geochemistry: Surface chemistry (geochemical reactions)
• incomp: Legacy solvers for incompressible two and single-phase flow based on sequential splitting.
• mimetic/mpfa: Incompressible consistent discretizations (see incomp) for the pressure equation.

Most solvers support flow driven by wells, source terms and boundary conditions.

1. MATLAB-BGL -  MATLAB Boost Graph Library is a useful set of utilities which contains MATLAB-compatible binaries of the useful Boost Graph Library. Functions such as connected components, depth first search etc are not included in standard MATLAB and are often inefficient when implemented in pure MATLAB. BSD License. http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/10922
2. METIS  -  partitioning of fully unstructured grids is easily done by translating the problem to sparse matrices and calling existing routines. METIS is one such library that is released under a permissive Apache License 2.0. http://glaros.dtc.umn.edu/gkhome/metis/metis/overview 
3. Export_fig -  to produce high quality figures for publications the custom export utility export_fig is extremely useful. Some key features include arbitrary resolution rendering and automatic cropping of figure axes. BSD License. http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/23629-exportfig 
4. AMGCL - https://github.com/ddemidov/amgcl General-purpose iterative linear solver library. See the linearsolvers module in MRST for examples of usage. Permissible license - recommended solvers to use for larger models.
5. AGMG - specialized solvers for elliptic problems arising from the discretization of e.g. the pressure equation can greatly speed up simulation times. We often use AGMG because it has convenient MATLAB bindings included, but the current version is unfortunately no longer released under the GPL license, but free licenses are provided for academic purposes. http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~ynotay/AGMG/