star-phor(1) General Commands Manual star-phor(1)

star-phor - statistical solver for the RTE in photoreactors

star-phor [-fhv] [-n samples] [-o output] [-t threads] [file]

star-phor solves the radiative transfer equation (RTE) in a photoreactive configuration defined using the star-phor-input(5) configuration file specification. If the file is not defined, the configuration is readen from the standard input. Currently, star-phor is capable of evaluating the mean volumetric rate of energy absorption (MVREA), as well as the total energy absorbed by a given surface, provided that the corresponding volume or surface is defined as a sensor in the configuration file. Results are written according to the star-phor-output(5) specification.

star-phor employs state-of-the-art Monte Carlo techniques to compute these quantities, benefiting from the inherent advantages of the method, such as a computational cost independent of geometrical complexity, scale ratios, and phenomenological complexity. Parallelism is also implemented.

Options are as follows:

-f

Force overwriting of the output file if it already exists.

-h

Output short help and exit.

-n samples_count

By default, the number of realisations is 10000.

-o output

File in which the simulation results will be written. If none is specified, star-phor will write to the standard output.

-t threads_count

Advice on the number of threads to use. By default, star-phor uses all available threads.

-v

Make star-phor verbose. Multiple -v options increase the verbosity. The maximum is 3. Possible values are ‘0’ (no message), ‘1’ (-v; error messages only), ‘2’ (-vv; error and warning messages), and ‘3’ (-vvv; error, warning and informative messages). All the messages are written to standard error. Default is 0.

The star-phor utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

Simulate radiative transfer for the system described in the photoreactor.txt file, according to the star-phor-input(5) grammar. Make the program as detailed as possible (options -vvv) and use as many threads as there are cores available on the system (default behavior). Use 100,000 Monte Carlo realisations to estimate the sensor measurements as listed in the photoreactor.txt input file (option -n). Finally, write the estimated values to the result.txt file, unless this file already exists. In this case, star-phor will stop without performing the calculation and return an error. This behavior prevents previous results from being accidentally overwritten. To force the file to be rewritten, the user should explicitly define the -f option.

star-phor -vvv -n 100000 -o result.txt photoreactor.txt

star-phor-input(5), sphin(1)

star-phor has been developed thanks to the funding of the ECOCHEM project (ProjetIA-22-PESP-0006) belonging to the PEPR SPLEEN.

2026-04-15 UNIX