Release Notes: Altair Feko 2021.1.2

Altair Feko 2021.1.2 is available with new features, corrections and improvements. This version (2021.1.2) is a patch release that should be applied to an existing 2021 installation.

Feko is a powerful and comprehensive 3D simulation package intended for the analysis of a wide range of electromagnetic radiation and scattering problems. Applications include antenna design, antenna placement, microstrip antennas and circuits, dielectric media, scattering analysis, electromagnetic compatibility studies including cable harness modelling and many more.

WinProp is the most complete suite of tools in the domain of wireless propagation and radio network planning. With applications ranging from satellite to terrestrial, from rural via urban to indoor radio links, WinProp’s innovative wave propagation models combine accuracy with short computation times.

newFASANT complements Altair’s high frequency electromagnetic software tool (Altair Feko) for general 3D EM field calculations, including, among others, special design tools tailored for specific applications like complex radomes including FSS, automated design of reflectarrays and ultra-conformed reflector antennas, analysis of Doppler effects, ultrasound systems including automotive or complex RCS, and antenna placement problems. Advanced solver technologies like the MoM combined with the characteristic basis functions (CBFS), PO/GO/PTD, GTD/PO and MLFMM parallelised through MPI/OpenMP, being some of them especially efficient for the analysis of electrically very large problems.

Feko 2021.1.2 Release Notes

The most notable extensions and improvements to Feko are listed by component.

CADFEKO

Feature

  • Avoid re-meshing and storage of unnecessary model files for the RCS farming application macro when it is not required.

Resolved Issues

  • Fixed a regression that got introduced in Feko 2021.0.3 that caused a crash when opening a file with non-ASCII Unicode characters in the file path.
  • Resolved an issue where the RL-GO edge and wedge diffraction setting was not written to the .pre file and therefore not taken into account during simulation.
  • Fixed an error in the automatic calculation of the outer radius between two shields when defining a cable cross-section in a CADFEKO model using a model unit other than meters.

POSTFEKO

Features

  • Added command line support to the Combine RCS sweep results from cluster macro to support a non-interactive mode that can be used to combine the results directly on the simulation cluster.
  • Extended the POSTFEKO API with the ContinuousFrequencyAxis property on various result data types to allow querying whether axes are continuous (as opposed to discrete). This is useful, for example, to evaluate whether an axis can be resampled.

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved an issue where the ribbon was not updated following the removal of a model. Selecting a button that was incorrectly enabled, for example, one of the buttons in the Add results group, could cause an assertion to fail.
  • Improved the conditional test used by the Generate antenna array script to determine the FEM line port edge properties. An error is avoided for the case of an empty wire collection.

Solver

Features

  • Added support for waveguide ports in the model decomposition framework.
  • Improved AVX/AVX2 support detection for some older AMD CPU's.

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved a floating point exception that was issued when computing cable per-unit-length parameters due to the presence of degenerate curvilinear triangles in the mesh of the cable cross-section.
  • Resolved passivity violations in S-parameter results of some models with windscreens consisting of multiple media.
  • Resolved an issue that led to asymmetry in far field results of some models solved with MLFMM.
  • Resolved an issue that resulted in inaccurate results of a direct solution (using LU decomposition) of some windscreen models with multiple media.
  • Improved the accuracy of faceted UTD results due to reflections from concave surfaces.

Support Components

Features

  • Extended the Calculate mixed mode S-parameters application macro to support calculation for N-port cases. Previously this was limited to 4 ports.

Resolved Issues

  • Linux support for the PollEx REI file pre-processing script in the application macro library has been improved.

WinProp 2021.1.2 Release Notes

The most notable extensions and improvements to WinProp are listed by component.

ProMan

Features

  • Added time stamps to the log files written by ProMan as well as standard output from WinPropCLI.
  • Accelerated the database partitioning phase of a simulation with the dominant path model.
  • Added support for exporting FMCW radar signal processing results to an ASCII file.

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved an issue that led to the creation of corrupted databases, in some cases, during database conversion from the open street map format. Potentially corrupted databases obtained using previous versions of WinProp may need to be converted using this version.
  • Resolved an issue regarding the height of prediction points for indoor projects solved with DPM model in trajectory or point mode.
  • Resolved an issue that resulted in wrong signal levels associated with propagation paths when switching display from one result type to another.
  • Resolved a crash that occurred during the geometry processing phase of a DPM solution of an indoor scenario project with a large database.
  • Resolved an issue when building and topography databases have a different earth curvature. The error message is converted into a warning message.
  • Resolved an issue about selecting prediction layers in a loaded project in which the local setting Display all prediction layers had been checked.
  • Relaxed an error message to a warning, in an IRT simulation, when the total sum of the numbers of reflections, diffraction and scattering is less than the user-defined maximum number of reflections and diffraction in a path.
  • Removed unnecessary warning messages for an indoor project.
  • Resolved an issue that resulted in a factor of 10 being applied to topography heights after masking.
  • Resolved an issue that resulted in the inability to activate legend display, after it was disabled, through the local display settings menu.
  • Resolved an issue that resulted in the inability to activate legend display, after it was disabled, through the local display settings menu.
  • Resolved an issue when the prediction area is larger than the preprocessed area for RunMS simulations.
  • Fixed a rare case where plotting the Channel Impulse Response (CIR) could result in an infinite loop.
  • Resolved a simulation error that occurred in a project with negative topographical heights, simulated with the ITU-R P.1411 propagation model.

WallMan

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved an issue that led to the creation of corrupted databases, in some cases, during database conversion from the open street map format. Potentially corrupted databases obtained using previous versions of WinProp may need to be converted using this version.
  • Resolved conversion errors that may occur when converting some .stl files into the WinProp binary format.

Application Programming Interface

Features

  • Added multi-threading support for predictions of rural projects with the WinProp API.
  • Added time stamps to the log files written by ProMan as well as standard output from WinPropCLI.
  • Added an example with mobile station post-processing to the set of API examples that are distributed with the installation
  • Added support for all types of databases in the WinProp API.

Resolved Issues

  • Removed unnecessary warning messages for an indoor project.
  • Fixed possible discrepancies between Network-Planning settings in the GUI and in the WinProp API.
  • Resolved a topo database conversion failure from the ASCII line format into the standard binary format using the WinProp API.
  • Fixed a crash that could occur when using WinPropCLI with a large number of threads.

newFASANT 2021.1.2 Release Notes

The most notable extensions and improvements to newFASANT are listed by component.

GUI

Feature

  • RUNFEKO can now be used to launch newFASANT simulations.

Resolved Issue

  • Resolved an issue which prevents aborting a mono-static RCS calculation with many directions in the MONCROS module.
  • Added support for importing NASTRAN mesh files consisting of curved elements of type CTRIA6 and CQUAD8. Resolved an issue that led to errors when importing some meshes in the NASTRAN format.

Solver

Features

  • Improved the parallel efficiency of OpenMP based multi-threaded MLFMM solutions.
  • Removed the limitation of the distance between antenna and radome structure in the analysis of radomes using CBFM.