I wanted to share a brief update on my progress with ASPECT. I’ve been working on understanding it in more depth and recently reviewed Behr et al. (2022), which was kindly suggested by @jbnaliboff. I found their approach using an additional visco-plastic material model plugin particularly insightful.
I have successfully used this plugin to implement my own model with ASPECT v2.1, and the results are quite interesting. However, I am currently encountering convergence issues around 7 million years. I would like to transition to the latest version of ASPECT, as it includes improvements such as the World Builder and enhanced nonlinear solver schemes. However, my current limitation is that I have little experience with C++ coding.
I would greatly appreciate any advice or support regarding the following:
Is it possible to run an older plugin with a newer version of ASPECT?
Has anyone developed or is currently working on an updated or similar additional visco-plastic material model plugin?
Would anyone be willing to collaborate or assist in updating the older plugin for compatibility with newer ASPECT versions?
I think updating the plugin would be a lot of work as there have been many changes since the version it was based on. That said, most of what is used there can be done using the current ASPECT functionality, or by modifying the drucker parameters to produce similar strength profiles to what they get from the byerlee law. I have a study in review that updated their prm file/setup to work with a more recent ASPECT for 3D models, you can find an example here:
This still was with a now outdated ASPECT version, but I think from here updating it to work with the most recent version shouldn’t be too much work. I will note that some of the prefactors were changed a bit to get a different transition strain rate and lower mantle viscosity jump than what they used, so those are some parameters you could mess around with. If you have any other questions on getting this working let me know!