The AutoTransient tool automates the "mechanical" parts of an analysis of transient phenomena with HIFREQ and FFTSES. It runs both programs in turn, using the computation frequencies recommended by FFTSES to run HIFREQ, until user-defined termination criteria are met. It also builds the FFTSES computation databases from the resulting HIFREQ databases (F21 files).

Technical Highlights

• The AutoTransient program carries out the standard steps of a HIFREQ-FFTSES transient study automatically. Starting from template FFTSES and HIFREQ files (generated with CDEGS Input Toolbox, or any other editor), the program runs the Forward FFTSES and finds the first set of recommended computation frequencies. After running HIFREQ at those frequencies and building the FFTSES Input Databases, the program runs the Inverse FFTSES and deduces the next set of recommended frequencies. This last step is repeated until the termination criteria are met.
• You can choose to stop the program once there are no more recommended frequencies, when a specified amount of time has elapsed, or when a specified number of cycles of the above procedure have been carried out.
• When running HIFREQ, you can choose to run all recommended frequencies, or to run only one frequency at a time. This last method, which would be very cumbersome to do manually, gives a lot of flexibility since many electrical properties (resistivities, permeabilities, etc…) can be varied as a function of frequency. The program allows you to specify frequency-dependent soil characteristics through a simple dialog. With a little bit of programming effort, you can specify a frequency-dependence for any non-geometrical quantity defined in the HIFREQ template file.
• The program performs basic data cross-validation between HIFREQ and FFTSES, to help avoid the most common data entry problems in a transient analysis.
• You can interrupt the analysis at any time, then restart it where you left off.