Release Notes: Altair Feko 2021.2.2

Altair Feko 2021.2.2 is available with new features, corrections and improvements. This version (2021.2.2) 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 2021.2.2 Release Notes

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

CADFEKO

Feature

  • Improved the functioning of volume mesh refinement rules. Point refinement rules will now take effect when completely embedded inside a region. Before, the refinement region had to touch or cross a face to have any effect.

Resolved Issue

  • Corrected a problem where the far field source was written out incorrectly to the .pre file when changing a far field data definition from using a specified point range to using all data blocks. The simulation seemingly ignored the updated setting.

POSTFEKO

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved the following issues with polar graph zoom levels:
    • Polar graph zoom levels did not persist in saved projects (.pfs files).
    • Zooming to extents on polar graphs did not respect the radial grid range settings.
    • Newly created polar graphs were not zoomed to extents for all graph range settings.

Solver

Feature

  • An error is now given if a twisted pair with an unrealistically short pitch length is specified in a cable definition.

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved a bug in near and far field computations of faceted UTD models, resulting in accuracy improvements.
  • The model setup time of a faceted UTD simulation is now reported under the “Reading and constructing the geometry” entry of the timing section at the end of the .out file.
  • Resolved a bug that led to inaccurate results when calculating near fields from a request that only contains the magnetic near field with the scattered field only option.
  • Reduced the impact of a change made in the Feko 2021.2.1 patch update that resulted in slower simulations when many wire segments were included.
  • Corrected a slowdown in the solution of some simulations using periodic boundary conditions (PBC).
  • Fixed a bug in the parallel MLFMM fast far fields when a translation (OF card) is present.
  • Accelerated and improved the parallel efficiency of near field computations by reducing the communication overhead in parallel simulations with a large number of processes.
  • Fixed an exception during the ray launching phase of RL-GO when using an aperture source and parallel solution.
  • Revised the check for the validity of a combined MoM/MTL solution of an unshielded cable to include unbounded cross-sections whose dielectric material is the same as that of the background medium.

Shared Interface Changes

Feature

  • Limited the display frequency of the license expiration notice to once per day instead of every time a component is launched.

Support Components

Resolved Issue

  • Relaxed the check for the version of the existing Feko installation, to enable the installation of WRAP 2021.2 into a patch updated version of Feko.

WinProp 2021.2.2 Release Notes

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

ProMan

Features

  • It is now possible to globally define the TDD configuration for all the cells from the Air Interface tab of a 5G project in ProMan.
  • Added support for yaw/pitch/roll angle transformations applied to time variant objects.
  • Added support for prepossessing multiple heights for urban databases.
  • Site name and cell name are now included in the respective text files for network projects solved with the trajectory mode.
  • Added support for the extended cyclic prefix for 5G network planning projects.
  • Added support for a user-defined maximum inner angle of wedges to be included in diffraction computations with SBR/SRT. This value can be used to accelerate SBR/SRT predictions, depending on the geometry of the objects in the database.

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved a bug that resulted in higher than expected received power results when one switches transmitter settings from OutputPA to EIRP in a fully polarimetric project with a horizontally polarised .ffe antenna pattern, created in AMan, at the transmitter.
  • The ground reflected ray is now accounted for in the main lobe of the transmitter when gain adaptation is activated in the SBR solver.
  • Resolved an issue that resulted in reflection contributions not being computed when the maximum number of transmissions is set to one in the SBR solver.
  • Prevented exceptionally high memory usage during wedge detection in a complicated geometry.
  • Resolved an issue that reflection was included although only scattering was requested in the SRT propagation model.
  • Fixed a bug in the computation of ground clutter.
  • Improved the robustness and accuracy of the SBR solver by further preventing rays from slipping through wedges into buildings or other objects in the database.
  • Optional additional vector data, such as roads, rivers and railway lines, are now displayed below the buildings and result planes.
  • Resolved an error that prevented execution of RunMS in a UWB network planning project.
  • Avoided a RunMS error when a transmitter located inside an urban building was automatically shifted to the roof of the building.
  • Resolved a bug that resulted in the first time step of a time-variant simulation being displayed multiple times in the drop-down menu.
  • Resolved an issue that caused vegetation objects still being displayed in a project after being disabled.
  • Corrected the display location in urban scenarios of transmitters that had to be shifted upward automatically to avoid placement inside buildings.
  • Resolved an issue related to a inability to close the mobile post-processing, including Tx and Rx, dialog box after cancelling computation.

WallMan

Features

  • Added support for yaw/pitch/roll angle transformations applied to time variant objects.
  • Added support for prepossessing multiple heights for urban databases.
  • The centre of the focused 2D view is now suggested as the location of an imported database, in WallMan, by default so that the imported database is immediately visible to a user.

Resolved Issues

  • Deleted walls are now removed from their associated object groups.
  • Resolved an issue that caused velocities in the definition of a time-variant trajectory to be shifted by one segment.
  • Group of objects defined in .dxf or .dwg files are now preserved when converted to the WinProp binary database format.
  • Resolved an issue that resulted in the absence of segment to segment visibility relations during IRT preprocessing of some indoor databases in WallMan.
  • Improved the calculation of the rotation of a moving object. The center of rotation is now used to calculate the angle by which the object is to be rotated, instead of the center of the moving object.
  • An error message is now issued when the absolute path for the preprocessing output file does not exist.
  • Wall-Check settings, specified under Global Settings, will be saved.
  • Resolved an issue that result in an object moving out of its trajectory, defined in RAC mode, in a time-variant simulation.
  • Resolved a bug where a higher number of threads than specified were used during indoor IRT preprocessing. This resulted in increased license usage.

AMan

Resolved Issue

  • Added support for sub-one degree pattern resolutions for antenna patterns in the MSI format.

Application Programming Interface

Feature

  • Added support for UWB network planning projects with WinPropCLI.

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved an issue that caused warnings to be triggered when compiling WinProp API examples on Linux.
  • Resolved an issue where network planning results were incorrectly marked as not computed, when a project simulated with WinPropCLI is opened in ProMan.
  • Resolved inconsistencies in the requirement to include the file extension when converting databases into the WinProp binary format using the API. The file extension is now automatically appended if it was not supplied by a user.

newFASANT 2021.2.2 Release Notes

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

General

Feature

  • When launching a newFASANT project using RUNFEKO, the output indicates when options that are not supported for newFASANT solvers are passed to RUNFEKO.

Resolved Issues

  • When solving a problem using RT-CBFM with MPI, the MPI is now always launched correctly.
  • An assert no longer is triggered when using Volume Based Blocks for the CBFM.