Release Notes: Altair Feko 2023.1.2

Altair Feko 2023.1.2 is available with various corrections and improvements. This version (2023.1.2) is a patch release that should be applied to an existing 2023 or 2023.1 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.

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.

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.

WRAP is a comprehensive tool for electromagnetic propagation, antenna collocation and spectrum management. WRAP combines propagation analysis, often over large areas with many transmitters and receivers, with system analysis to include complex non-linear equipment properties.

Feko 2023.1.2 Release Notes

The most notable improvements to Feko are listed by component.

CADFEKO

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved a regression that prevented CADFEKO_BATCH version 2023.1.1 from successfully updating models with parameter changes. The problem could be observed as warnings in optimisation output that the execution of CADFEKO_BATCH failed. This regression had severe impact on optimisation workflows, causing OPTFEKO to terminate due to errors.
  • Fixed an intermittent hang triggered by running a Lua script from CADFEKO using a command line argument and running the script in non-interactive mode. This mechanism is used extensively when doing optimisations through HyperStudy, where this hang was prevalent.
  • Resolved an issue where importing a .fek file with transformed parts did not transform all triangles.
  • Resolved various meshing-related issues by updating the new meshing library to the latest version. This version resolves problems when meshing imported geometry, specifically with overlapping triangles created at the ends of slanted T-junctions and resilience against invalid meshes when vertices are very close together. There is improvements with the handling of thin metallic faces on dielectric boundaries to avoid collapsed triangles and small gaps, especially on symmetry boundaries. The remeshing of wire model meshes has also been improved.
  • Corrected an error where CADFEKO Lua scripts referencing string names of entities may have interpreted the strings as integer numbers resulting in index errors or operations on the incorrect entity.
  • When performing a series of of geometry operations, undo/redo operation and toggling automatic meshing, a potential crash is now avoided.
  • Resolved a crash that could occur when rotating the 3D view with the selection type set to edge selection.

Solver

Resolved Issue

  • A change made to the faceted UTD method in the Feko 2023.1.1 hotfix update caused poor performance and inaccurate results in some cases. This change has been reverted as part of this hotfix. The intended improvements will be reimplemented in a better way for a future release.

WinProp 2023.1.2 Release Notes

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

Application Programming Interface

Resolved Issue

  • Resolved an issue where the path loss was incorrectly calculated using the WinProp API.