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,
mrst-2020a
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.
flowSolverTutorial1
gravityColumn
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:
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:
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:
Most solvers support flow driven by wells, source terms and boundary conditions.
Published October 15, 2013