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OPENMA TOOLBOX README

Copyright (C) 2020 David M. Kaplan

  • Creator: David M. Kaplan
  • Creation Date: Friday, October 21, 2005
  • Date of last edit: $Date: 2007-11-18 02:34:54 -0800 (Sun, 18 Nov 2007) $
  • Version: 1.5
  • Licence: GPL (Gnu Public License)

All files in this toolbox are open source (GPL license) unless otherwise stated. The full license is included in the file license.txt.

This toolbox is designed to generate eigen and boundary modes on a domain and then fit those modes to data following the work of Lipphardt et al. [2000], Lekien et al. [2004] and Kaplan & Lekien [in prep.]. All the files generally have sufficient help and there is a brief demo of some of the functionality (openMA_demo).

This toolbox depends on matlab's PDE Toolbox for generating modes.

I will also collect here some notes regarding the toolbox, bugs and the pdetool. They are presented in no particular order. Please read these completely before using the toolbox.

  1. All the functions that generate modes use an adaptive mesh method to get a good mesh for the PDE problem. But, especially for the eigenvalue problems, the adaptive mesh method doesn't work too well. So, for best results, experience and some fooling around will be necessary to find the best mesh. In my experience, using the adaptive mesh method to find the first (constant) boundary mode tends to produce a detailed and relatively uniform grid. This grid can then be used for finding other modes. The adaptive mesh methods in each mode generating function can be turned off by setting the number of iterations to zero.
  2. The pdetool has many odd features (i.e. bugs), at least in Matlab R13. I will try to document them here, but some experimentation will be necessary.
  3. Using openMA_pdetool_eigenmodes_solve with Dirichlet boundary conditions fails after using openMA_pdetool_boundary_modes_solve without closing and restarting the pdetool. This is due to a weird bug in pdetool that I can't find a workaround for. In my experience, it is best to close and reopen pdetool after every mode solving operation. The same grid can be achieved after each open and close using pdetool_getset_mesh.
  4. pdetool uses pdeeig to solve for eigenvalues. pdeeig generates the appropriate matrices and then uses sptarn to get the eigenvalues. sptarn is run with the default TOLCONV (100*eps in matlab R13), JMAX (100), and MAXMUL (default is N, not sure what N is). JMAX means that the method will only find 100 eigenvalues in the specified range. If there are more than that number in the range, then matlab will exit before finding all of them. I have created the function openMA_pdetool_eigenmodes_solve_to_eigmax to solve this problem. It repeatedly searches for eigenmodes until the eig_max is truly reached.
  5. pdetool does not allow you to use the integral of a scalar function as a boundary condition, so solving for the boundary modes can be tricky as they are arbitrary up to a constant. Matlab tends to pick a very large value for this constant, ruining the precision of the modes themselves. To fix this, I have allowed a cheat: setting one small boundary element of the mode to have dirichlet boundary conditions. This fixes the mode and stabalizes the solver, but could cause, for example, current through land if the boundary segment used is too long.
  6. The functions that solve for the modes generally will normalize all modes so that the integral of the magnitude of the currents over the domain divided by the domain area is 1. Furthermore, the boundary modes are adjusted so that the integral of the scalar mode over the domain is 0 (as prescribed in Lekien et al. [2004]).
  7. pdetool appears to have problems with eigenvalue degeneracy, as probably do other methods. This can produce some strange results when the domain has lots of symmetry, like a square or a circle.
  8. Originally I used tsearch for much of the interpolation, but that fails in many ways for non-Delaunay grids and has bugs. So, now I have created tsearch_arbitrary to do much the same thing for any old triangular grid. But this is probably slow compared to tsearch.
  9. If you want to close the pdetool when running in batch mode, use delete(pde_fig), where pde_fig is the handle of the pdetool, instead of close(pde_fig) to close the pdetool. This will avoid any save dialogues that prevent the window from closing without user interaction.
  10. The pdetool has problems with boundary segments that have zero or a very small length. Therefore, one has to be very careful with the boundary curve so that it does not contain repeat coordinates or the coastline has too much fine detail. I recommend interpolating the coastline so that coast grid points are equally spaced. If you do not do this, pdetool will return some strange errors that are at times difficult to decifer.