bhardeman

Can you please send your PetraSim *.sim file and your Excel workbook to support@thunderheadeng.com for review? The attached *.htm document does not contain your entire Excel data set and appears to refer to other files that have not been attached to this thread. It is quite possible that the pinched cell is causing some convergence or accuracy problems. We have not taken any special steps in PetraSim to enforce a well-behaved mesh. We have simply tried to provide tools to create a variety of mesh types as requested by our users. Proper TOUGH2 simulations will still have to meet the mesh criteria specified in the TOUGH2 users guide. PetraSim allows grids to be shifted in the vertical direction, which can lead to non-conforming grids. Some modest shifting will introduce small but acceptable errors, but larger distortions can cause problems. Generally, if you have widely varying layer thickness, it is best to use a regular grid in PetraSim that follows the layers with a "stair-step" approximation.

You can add a command line argument to specify the size of the Java JVM heap. You can either add the command line to your PetraSim shortcut (right-click the shortcut and select properties), or at the command line from a command prompt running in the PetraSim installation folder (usually c:\program files\petrasim 5). For example, you can enter the following at the command line: C:\Program Files (x86)\PetraSim 5>ps -J-Xmx1000m This will create the JVM with 1,000 MB of heap space. To set the allocation to 500MB, the final argument would become -J-Xmx500m Your particular error could actually be the result of a heap that is too large. I would begin by lowering the heap allocation from the default 700MB in 100MB increments and see if the program will run properly. If that does not work, then try increasing in 100MB increments. In a 32-bit process, there is a 2GB (2,000MB) limit on memory, which is shared between the Java JVM and the rest of the program (native language code). Because of this, there is a practical limit on the heap size of around 1200MB. To set this memory option on the program shortcut, add the option to the end of the "Target" line of the properties for the Shortcut. Regards, Brian

The rock properties used by TOUGH2 are for dry rock. ____________________ Brian Hardeman Thunderhead Engineering

Setting the maximum number of time steps to 9999 is a special flag in the builds of TOUGH2 supplied with PetraSim. If set to 9999, TOUGH will ignore the iteration limit and continue to iterate until either the problem converges, reaches the end time, or the user terminates the process. The progress monitor window in PetraSim dynamically parses the TOUGH2 output file to look for progress information. Because this file is written with FORTRAN fixed format, once the iteration number reaches 10000, it overflows the 4 spaces allocated for writing. It looks like the progress window does not expect this and stops updating the progress information. However, the underlying simulation is still running. You can ignore the max iteration message when the simulation ends. We have confirmed this as a bug in the current release. In the current version, the dynamic progress update will stop, and an incorrect warning will be displayed, but the simulation will continue. Best Regards, Brian