Release Notes: Altair Feko 2024.0.1

Altair Feko 2024.0.1 is available with new features, corrections and improvements. This version (2024.0.1) is a patch release that should be applied to an existing 2024 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 2024.0.1 Release Notes

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

CADFEKO

Features

  • Added the option to reverse the normal on a model mesh triangle element.
  • Added a new Regroup feature to allow manipulating the labels of a mesh part. The Regroup action can be found on the Mesh tab in the Repair group. Regroup can be used to move a selection of triangle mesh elements into a new mesh label or it can be applied to a mesh part to automatically split up the mesh into separate labels based on its boundary edges.
  • Improved visibility of sub-part modification. Added warnings to notify the user that settings might not propagate to the root-level part when applied to a sub-part, which would result in the settings not being used during simulation.
  • Made the following improvements to cable path rendering:
    • Improved cable path styling. The increased line thickness and colour change should make cable paths easier to see in the 3D view.
    • Cable paths are now cut by cutplanes.
    • Cutplanes do not cut items that are rendered due to an open dialog.
  • Upgraded the ECAD import library used by CADFEKO to the latest version provided by Altair PollEx.
  • The CAM350 format is supported for PCB imports.

Resolved Issues

  • Fixed a possible crash when executing the solver from CADFEKO.
  • Fixed a bug where performing actions quickly through fast mouse clicking could result in a crash.
  • Resolved an assertion failure that could occur when opening a .cfx file where modifications have been made to model meshes.
  • Prevented a crash or assertion failure when creating new model mesh triangles.
  • Prevented an assertion failure when deleting model mesh triangles.
  • Fixed a crash when deleting filtered details tree entities which had errors.
  • Resolved a crash when importing a model with invalid variable group labels containing spaces into Feko 2024, as well as an issue that the tree appeared incomplete when opening the model. Such models could be created in older versions before validation was made stricter in Feko 2024. The problem also affected the EMC log periodic antenna from the component library, causing a crash when trying to add it to a project.
  • Fixed a possible crash when automatic meshing is disabled and undo operations are performed.
  • Fixed a crash that could have been caused by undoing an action and saving in some cases.
  • Fixed a crash that may have been triggered on save, when a wire port references a wire on a geometry part that was separated.
  • Fixed a crash that could happen when generating a volume mesh when using the new mesher.
  • Fixed a volume mesh bug that caused the creation of tetrahedra that were too small.
  • Fixed a meshing bug where surface mesh gradation was not propagated to wires in close proximity.
  • Resolved meshing problems related to periodic boundary conditions when using the new mesher:
    • Resolved an issue that caused overlapping triangles at periodic boundaries.
    • Resolved an issue where volume meshing sometimes failed for regions when bounded by periodic boundaries in two dimensions.
  • Improved meshing of models with invalid geometry.
  • Resolved an issue with the Find Intersecting Mesh Elements tool that did not take transforms on mesh parts into account.
  • Models containing polygonal UTD plates with more than ten corners can now be loaded and visualised.
  • Corrected a problem with the scaling of hyperbolic arcs.
  • Fixed a mesh size problem with the offset Cassegrain reflector antenna component in the component library.
  • Added context menus when dropping entities into and out of groups to improve usability.
  • Resolved an issue where duplicating geometry in groups resulted in the duplicated geometry being placed in the geometry collection instead of inside the group.
  • Fixed an issue where modifying non-root-level geometry inside of a subtract may have resulted in the subtract operation not being correctly applied in the geometry evaluation.
  • Resolved an issue where modifying non-root-level geometry incorrectly resulted in a missing face at the root-level.
  • Resolved an issue where verification failed for a coating setting previously applied to a face.
  • Resolved an issue where an SL card was incorrectly written out to the .pre file when the cable harness was set to solve using MTL. Schematic links can be used to define connections between cable schematic elements and 3D geometry when the combined MoM/MTL solution method is used.
  • Resolved an issue where redundant automatic schematic links were being written to the .pre file.
  • Added verification of the separation distance for schematic links that define the connection between cables and geometry.
  • Extended edge port creation validation to allow specifying a combination of root-level and child part faces in the positive and negative faces list. Schematic link validation now also allows specifying root-level faces in association with an edge port specified using child part faces (and vice versa).
  • Added verification to shielded enclosures requiring connectors to be specified.
  • Fixed an issue with the Generate Antenna Array application macro where the phase difference between array elements, when specified, did not get applied to the excitations.
  • Fixed a label dependency in the Create Inductive Charging Coil application macro.
  • Fixed an issue for the Create Edge Port for Finite Substrate application macro, where the voltage source is not added to the edge port when sources were set to per configuration in the model.

POSTFEKO

Feature

  • Significantly improved the performance of loading a model with a large number of faces (greater then 10 000) with each of the faces specified to be solved with RL-GO.

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved an issue where a POSTFEKO session file containing FEM line ports could not be re-opened if it was created in version 2024 or updated and saved in version 2024. An error message would report that it was an unsupported .pfs file version. The sessions that were previously saved can now be opened.
  • Resolved a crash that could have been encountered when trying to open certain cable models. The problem affected models where a cable bundle definition was updated to reference a cable cross section that was created after the cable bundle.
  • Resolved an assertion failure when changing the source of a near field surface power trace to another result which uses a different coordinate system.
  • Resolved an issue with the calculation of second minimum annotations. The incorrect calculation was a regression that got introduced in POSTFEKO 2022.2.
  • Fixed the utf8 conversion for the Optimise model in HyperStudy application macro. Special characters used in the description field of a variables in CADFEKO are now transferred correctly to the relevant variables in HyperStudy.
  • Resolved an issue that caused the Transmission Line Calculator application macro to terminate with an error when launching it from POSTFEKO.

Solver

Features

  • For faceted UTD, improved checks are used to test for connected surfaces (aligned mesh) and relevant error feedback is provided.
  • Improved the memory usage when computing visibility matrices during a faceted UTD solution.
  • Improved feedback regarding the convergence of the RBi-CGSTAB iterative process, when it is terminated due to reaching the maximum restart level number of iterations.

Resolved Issues

  • Avoided an error when network transformations are required for many ports.
  • The number of CPUs and cores is correctly detected for modern CPUs and for high core-count CPUs the processes can be used correctly on Windows. In some cases, the correct environment variables may need to be set to use all available processes.

Shared Interface Changes

Resolved Issue

  • Fixed the validation for the conductivity and resistivity input fields for the Calculate Skin Depth application macro.

Support Components

Resolved Issue

  • Prevent PREFEKO from triggering ERROR 23480 indicating an inconsistent number of samples in a near field data source when the data is consistent.

WinProp 2024.0.1 Release Notes

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

General

Resolved Issues

  • Fixed numerical problems that could have occurred during the geometry check in TuMan.
  • Resolved an issue where the special characters were not displayed correctly on dialogs.
  • Improved the display of Example-C18-LTE_Urban. This is one of the examples included in the installation package and available in the installation folder, for example, C:\Program Files\Altair\2024\help\winprop\examples\ExampleGuide_models.
  • Resolved an issue in TuMan where the Track List ASCII import did not import PORTAL, NODE, and SPLINE, elements, resulting in the Automatic generation of missing track elements not working correctly.

ProMan

Features

  • Added support for line plots and the export of data along polylines for arbitrary planes.
  • Added support for satellite transmitters outside the topo map when using the ray-optical propagation models SRT/SBR to consider multipaths.
  • Added support for defining a non-stationary satellite with the location in meter scale by adding the Long/Lat in Deg (otherwise meter) check box to the Satellite Location dialog. In the past, only the longitude and latitude definition was possible.
  • For transmitters outside the prediction area (for example, satellites), the whole available topo and clutter map is now considered for the rural propagation models in the vertical plane. In previous releases, only the topo and clutter map of the prediction area were considered, which impacted the computation of the ground reflection for part of the area.
  • Extended the report generation to include 3D views with results.
  • Improved the 2D view display of vertical plane results computed by the Parabolic Equation solver to be automatically scaled in the Z-direction.
  • Improved the parallel efficiency when computing multiple antennas defined in parallel, thus decreasing the average runtime per antenna.
  • A warning dialog will be displayed if a result cannot be loaded from the result tree.

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved an issue with the superposition of electric field components in RunMS in the case of full polarimetric projects.
  • Corrected the LOS/NLOS map for the deterministic two-ray model.
  • Resolved an issue where using the SRT/SBR in full polarimetric projects with empirical interaction losses caused the results not to be computed.
  • Resolved an issue where the database name was incorrectly appended when opening the Pixel Databases or Building Data tabs.
  • Corrected the consideration of MS polarisation for non full-polarimetric projects.
  • Resolved an issue where parts of a large database were not displayed in the 3D view.
  • Resolved an issue where the repeater coverage was not calculated due to incorrect assignment of gateways/repeaters.
  • A warning will be issued when MIMO is disabled in a network planning project and the defined MIMO IDs are ignored.
  • Added support to import measurements from a .csv file.
  • Removed a memory leak that occurred for time-variant projects containing trajectories.
  • Corrected the Propagation Paths dialog so that its size can be increased vertically to make more rays and their properties visible.
  • The progress window is now automatically closed when a new computation is launched. If the progress window remains open, a warning dialog will inform the user that the progress window must be closed before a new computation can be started.

WallMan

Feature

  • Improved the CAD import in WallMan to handle scaling factors with commas. For very small scaling factors, the scale will be set to 1.0.

AMan

Resolved Issue

  • Resolved an issue that could have occurred for some cases where the tilt in .msi antenna patterns was assumed to be mechanical, leading to incorrect interpolation.

Application Programming Interface

Resolved Issue

  • Updated the WinProp API to include all the supported propagation models. The list of propagation models was previously incomplete at some locations.

newFASANT 2024.0.1 Release Notes

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

General

Resolved Issue

  • Resolved an issue with importing a .nas mesh file into newFASANT.