The Star Geothermal Reservoir Simulation System in a PC Computing Environment

Abstract

STAR, Maxwell's numerical reservoir simulator, solves a set of nonlinear partial differential equations which describe unsteady flow of fluid mass and heat in heterogeneous rock formations. STAR was initially written primarily in FORTRAN for UNIX workstations. Now that inexpensive and powerful PC's are available, the STAR simulator and related post-processing software have been converted for PC operation. First, all computational source code was moved to the PC platform and compiled with DIGITAL "Visual Fortran for Microsoft Windows" on a Pentium II machine. Non-standard features were identified and removed. The printed output was compared to that generated by a UNIX workstation for a suite of test problems, with favorable results. Next, STAR's internal graphics software was transferred to the PC. The lowest level graphics routines were replaced with routines which use some of the Windows graphics primitives. With the completion of these two steps, operation of the software on a PC is now functionally equivalent to operation on a UNIX workstation, and existing UNIX users should have little difficulty running STAR on a PC. We plan to maintain both versions in the future.