Meltsout -- a sifter for melts.out

This program is a parser for the melts.out output file from the program MELTS by Mark Ghiorso. The reason is that the output in this particular file is in a cumbersome form to be swallowed by Excel and the like. The other files are (deliberately) in comma-delimited ascii, 1 record to a line. Melts.out is in a more human-friendly but less Excel-friendly format, and is the only place where information about the phase assemblages during the progress of the model is stored.

Linux 64 bit (zipped) and Windows executables are included. Compilation is simple:

$ gcc *.c -o meltsout

If you simply invoke meltsout from a (Linux, Mac or Windows) command line, it opens the file melts.out in the current working directory. Alternatively, you can specify an input file (say, for example you have renamed melts.out):

meltsout newname.out

There are no other command line parameters, and no help, beyond this file. If meltsout is not in your Path, then you will need to navigate to the directory where it is located and type './meltsout' instead. The output from this program goes to standard output, but you can redirect it to a file:

meltsout > meltphas.txt

This file will then contain a list of phases (first two letters only!) and percentages. If there are two of a given mineral (e.g., two feldspars), then these are both shown.

Here is part of the output from a run of MELTS after sifting:

1236: Li 100.0
1233: Li 99.6 sp  0.4
1230: Li 99.4 sp  0.6
1227: Li 99.2 sp  0.8
1224: Li 99.0 sp  0.9
1221: Li 98.9 sp  1.1
1218: Li 98.7 sp  1.3
1215: Li 98.5 sp  1.5
1212: Li 98.3 sp  1.6
1209: Li 98.2 sp  1.8
1206: Li 97.9 ol  0.1 sp  2.0
1203: Li 97.5 ol  0.3 sp  2.1
1200: Li 97.2 ol  0.6 sp  2.3
....

You can see the liquidus (1236 degrees C), the apearance of spinel at 1233 C, and the addition of olivine at 1206 C. The model continued to eventually crystallize 7 phases at 80% crystallized. A second spinel briefly appeared and then disappeared, and then reappeared. This output makes these events easy to see (the total output is 79 lines long) compared to the original melts.out file, which was 240K.

The program also produces another output file called meltsift.txt that simply contains a dump of each melts.out record in which the number of phases has changed. Even a very complicated model output is therby reduced to about 10% of its original size, and can be read much more easily. This file is useful if you want to see what mineral compositions went with the phases listed.

Jonathan E. Snow, 10.8.1997, MPI for Chemistry, Mainz.

Recoded November 23, 2017, University of Houston.