Release Notes: Altair Feko 2022.3.1

Altair Feko 2022.3.1 is available with new features, corrections and improvements. This version (2022.3.1) is a patch release that should be applied to an existing 2022 or 2022.3 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 2022.3.1 Release Notes

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

CADFEKO

Features

  • Corrected CEM validation to give a warning instead of an error for geometrically thin faces.
  • Added a fallback for legacy CADFEKO models that fail to convert to the new CADFEKO format when opening the model. If geometry fails to convert, the respective geometry is converted to a primitive. If geometry consisting of boolean operators (for example, union, subtract) fails to convert, it is converted to a primitive inside a group to show the creation hierarchy.
  • When importing Cartesian boundary near field data from files, the option to ignore a face of the near field boundary is now available. This option should be used to achieve accurate simulation results for Cartesian boundary near field data that was computed with one face of the Cartesian boundary coincident with a conductive plane.

Resolved Issues

  • Corrected the .pre file writing of the DI card for defining an anisotropic dielectric (Polder tensor).
  • For a model with many near field requests, an assert is no longer triggered when clicking in the model tree while the near fields are being rendered (after switching to the Configuration tab).
  • Cable instance and cable tube cross-section previews have been fixed to no longer show an empty preview intermittently.
  • Resolved a regression that caused signals and signal labels to be oriented incorrectly on the Cable Bundle and Cable Instance dialogs.
  • Improved the selection, right-click, double-click and moving behaviour of overlapping cable elements on the cable schematic view.
  • Resolved an issue where viewing the properties of a model mesh could have caused CADFEKO to become unresponsive.
  • Fixed a bug that could have caused overlapping segments when a model has multiple wire mesh ports.
  • Resolved issues related to rendering windscreen layers, such as the offset for the reference surface that was not considered and layers that were added in the wrong direction.
  • The conversion of a legacy CADFEKO model failed if the model contained an invalid outer radius for a cable bundle. A model status error will now be issued to indicate an incorrect outer radius.
  • Resolved an issue where DP card values were incorrectly rounded.
  • Fixed the visibility and rendering of edge ports (mesh and geometry) when connected to a ground plane.
  • Resolved an issue where loads, general networks and transmission lines were not referencing the root level face of edge ports in the .pre file, resulting in a solver error.
  • Resolved an issue that may have caused failure during the creation of an analytical curve.
  • Refined the validation for cable ribbon core spacing to use a spacial tolerance.
  • Added support to allow editing invalid entities in the tree. Previously the Properties option on the context menu was disabled for invalid items.
  • Resolved a crash that occurred when closing the Application Macro Collection dialog while a script was still running.
  • Fixed the conversion of legacy CADFEKO .cfx files that contained a loft operator.
  • Performance has been improved when opening legacy CADFEKO models in CADFEKO that contain many parts and deeply nested geometry trees.
  • Corrected validation to issue a warning instead of an error when meshing fails to allow the model to be corrected.
  • For a model that contains a layered dielectric, modifying face properties with the coating disabled assumes the value of the layered dielectric. Deleting the layered dielectric and saving the model will no longer trigger an assert.
  • Resolved an error that occurred when loading legacy .cfx files on AMD CPUs.
  • Resolved an issue that caused an assertion to fail when exporting a model mesh with symmetry and a wire mesh port to a .cfm file.
  • Increased the number of significant digits for snap points in the status bar.
  • Resolved an issue where defining a port on a wire with multiple segments could have caused a solver error.
  • Resolved an error where opening a legacy CADFEKO model failed to convert to the new CADFEKO format if there were duplicate element names on the network schematic view.
  • Resolved an issue where opening a legacy CADFEKO .cfx file where no .efe or .hfe files were specified failed to convert to the new CADFEKO format. If no file names are specified, defaults are provided, and a warning is issued.
  • Improved calculation of the distance between a cable harness and the closest conducting surface when performing model validation.
  • Resolved a problem where legacy .cfx files failed to convert to the new CADFEKO format for adaptive mesh refinement models. Improved the bounding box (model extents) for mesh refinement and darkened the mesh refinement display.
  • Mesh vertices close to a symmetry plane will snap to the symmetry plane to avoid tolerance errors during simulation.
  • Fixed an assertion that could fail when geometry containing wires was converted to a primitive.
  • Some crashes will no longer be triggered when importing selected .cfx files into CADFEKO.
  • Improved the legacy CADFEKO.cfx file conversion to the new CADFEKO format to support S-parameters that reference ports on networks.
  • Improved rectangle selection tool so that wires and edges can also be selected.
  • Implemented missing rendering functionality for wire connectivity.
  • Improved the rendering of the line preview to prevent flickering.
  • Resolved an issue where cable signals were incorrectly positioned on the Cable Instance dialog.
  • Fixed the conversion of legacy CADFEKO files that contained analytical curves. The same analytical curves created in legacy CADFEKO, can now also be created in the CADFEKO.
  • RUNFEKO dialog output is no longer duplicated when launching multiple runs from the same CADFEKO instance.
  • Added an error dialog that states the reason for failure when attempting to launch CADFEKO on a system where the required OpenGL version is not supported or available. Previously this may have failed silently, or the ribbon may have become unresponsive.
  • Resolved an issue where validation prevented the use of an FDTD ground plane. Added support for applying an edge mesh port to an FDTD ground plane.
  • Fixed the incorrect rendering of edge ports.
  • Empty (default) solution configurations are not loaded when importing a .cfx file. If the target model contains a single empty configuration, it is removed before adding the non-empty configurations from the imported .cfx file.
  • Resolved an issue where the contents of an assertion dialog were not added to the clipboard.
  • Resolved an issue where legacy CADFEKO .cfx files containing cable shields did not convert successfully when the transfer impedance was defined from a file.
  • Resolved a circular reference assert that occurred when converting a legacy CADFEKO model containing an edge port with a voltage source connected to an FDTD boundary PEC plane.

EDITFEKO

Features

  • Extended the AP and RA card to ignore a face (or faces) of the near field boundary when importing Cartesian boundary near field data from files.

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved a problem where the license units were not checked back in upon closing EDITFEKO.

Solver

Features

  • Added improved error checking when an impressed current coincides with, or is defined too close to triangular mesh elements.

Resolved Issues

  • Improved the accuracy of faceted UTD simulation of some models in the shadow region.
  • Resolved a problem where an error may have been encountered when running with the MPICH shipped with Feko on Linux due to libfabric dependancies.
  • Improved the accuracy of results of cable simulations involving twisted wire pairs.
  • Resolved an error that may have resulted in extremely long processing times during the ray-tracing phase of RL-GO or faceted UTD with shared memory enabled.
  • Avoid a floating point exception when computing a vector perpendicular to the cable path direction from the specified reference direction (used to orientate the cable cross section).
  • Losses in metallic triangles and layered dielectric media are now reported together under the “Metal and layered dielectric” entry of the summary of losses table in the .out file.

Support Components

Features

  • Added the capability, to remove selected faces of imported near field sources on a Cartesian boundary or CST near field data, in PREFEKO. This option is available for both receiving antennas and aperture field sources.
  • The Practical Guide to Ports and Sources is now available in the /help/feko/pdf folder. The document highlights essential information regarding ports and sources in Feko. It also shows practical examples of feeding typical structures such as waveguides, coaxial cables and microstrip structures.
  • Added a troubleshooting topic in the Feko User Guide on how to solve a drop-down list flashing with mouseover.

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved an error that occurred when loading math libraries during an OPTFEKO run on AMD CPUs.
  • Corrected the loading of the Associate max frequency with var variable list for the Create Frequency Ranges macro.
  • Fixed an issue with the Parameter Sweep application macro. Certain models have dependent files that are not copied along with the model files in previous versions.
  • Corrected ADAPTFEKO processing of modal port data blocks in case of multiple solutions per frequency.
  • Fixed the layer assignment in the PCB stack up for a PCB with signal and ground traces on a layer in the Pre-process REI File.
  • Updated the Create Inductive Charging Coils application macro to use the CADFEKO label convention when creating the coil with other GPM and CPM turn combinations other than the default.
  • Resolved assertion failures when some application macros were cancelled.

WinProp 2022.3.1 Release Notes

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

ProMan

Features

  • Multiple transmitter sites can now be deleted at once. This was restricted to one site deletion at a time in previous releases.
  • The display of selected rays can now be toggled on and off using the space bar.

Resolved Issues

  • A warning is given when an Angle-Range Heat Map with incoherent ray superposition is requested to indicate that coherent ray superposition will be used instead.
  • Resolved antenna duplicate name errors when defining multiple satellite transmitter sites from an Almanac file. Name collision is avoided by appending the site number to the name of the antenna.
  • Improved the calculation accuracy for cases where an antenna has been given a significant downtilt in a fully polarimetric project.
  • RCS objects are not considered for interactions when outside database polygons.

WallMan

Resolved Issues

  • Fixed a WallMan crash when attempting to define time-variance along a trajectory.
  • Coordinates of the converted indoor database are now consistent with those of the original CityGML file.

WRAP 2022.3.1 Release Notes

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

General

Features

  • Updated result of get Allotment API message to be inline with modify Allotment.

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved duplication of stations in the database when a site is created through API.