Release Notes: Altair Feko 2022.2.1
Altair Feko 2022.2.1 is available with new features, corrections and improvements. This version (2022.2.1) is a patch release that should be applied to an existing 2022 or 2022.1 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 2022.2.1 Release Notes
The most notable extensions and improvements to Feko are listed by component.
CADFEKO
Features
- Added an option to improve rendering speed at the cost of visual quality. This option can be useful when working with large or detailed models for better application responsiveness.
- Extended the mesh info dialog to include edge length information for tetrahedra.
Resolved Issues
- Corrected the model status validation and .pre file writing for RL-GO faces with coatings.
- Fixed a rendering issue that would result in geometry having erroneous spiky triangles.
- Resolved a crash where a union operation involved a modification to the face of a waveguide port.
- An "index out of range error" avoided during conversion of some Legacy .cfx files.
- Resolved a problem where coatings applied to model mesh segments were not written out to the .pre file. Coatings on mesh segments were not taken into account during simulation and were not present when viewing the model in POSTFEKO.
- Corrected a .pre file writing bug where the region medium referenced by waveguide ports could have been written out incorrectly.
- Corrected .pre file writing where loads were not correctly reset in all cases. The problem presented for models containing multiple configurations with the the same frequency setting where the loads differ between the first and last configuration.
- Options were added to the Solver Settings dialog to request additional debug output from RUNFEKO, OPTFEKO and ADAPTFEKO. This adds the -d option when launching the relevant Feko component.
- Added validation to prevent the creation of extremely small complex surfaces. Previously, this could have caused the application to crash.
- Fixed a problem when using the Tetrahedral mesh definition method for near fields that the simulation would calculate a single Cartesian near field point. The selected definition method is now correctly reflected in the FE card in the .pre file written out by CADFEKO and correctly transferred to the solver.
- Fixed a problem where nearby parts would be meshed together, causing an unexpected recalculation of the mesh even when changing settings that should not cause a recalculation to be triggered (for example changing global mesh settings when the part has local mesh settings applied). This bug could also have caused mesh settings of the one part being applied to the other part.
- Adjusted the curvature mesh settings slightly. This will most likely result in fewer mesh elements for models where curvature dominates the element size calculation.
- Improved performance during a union operation on larger models.
- Improved application usability during rendering.
- Removed validation that prevented activation of Remote launching of the Solver when host names were not yet defined.
- Added missing support for wires when defining model decomposition requests.
- Fixed .cfm file writing for mesh regions.
- Resolved an issue where importing Unigraphics/NX files resulted in no geometry. Unigraphics/NX files can now be imported.
- Corrected validation for transmission lines and general networks to take connections outside of the schematic view into account. A model status error was erroneously issued indicating that the network component needed connections when it was used in an S-parameter request or connected to a voltage source or a load.
- Fixed a bug that could have resulted in a critical error when finding distorted or oversized elements if the model has invalid or incomplete simulation meshes.
- Corrected the standard deviation and tetrahedral mesh information on the Mesh info dialog.
- Introduced stricter validation that prevents the creation of coincident points to avoid a crash when creating complex surfaces.
- Improved the startup time of new CADFEKO. Also improved loading and closing times of models with meshes containing large numbers of mesh elements.
- Renamed Include Cutout Layer to Include Board Outline, changed the default PCB import type to ODB++ and unchecked import of solder resist and board outline layers by default.
- Added the missing Field/Current Data context menu entry for Import Solution Coefficient Data.
EDITFEKO
Resolved Issues
- Resolved a regression introduced in a previous version where the generic aperture option for a FEM modal port was not available at the MB card.
POSTFEKO
Features
- The DRE import has been extended to support near-fields in a cylindrical coordinate system.
- Added the option to choose the Plane Wave Theta, Plane Wave Phi or Polarisation angle axes as independent axis for characteristic mode results plotted on a Cartesian graph.
Resolved Issues
- Corrected the header written out to .dat file when exporting data from a surface graph to show the correct unit.
- Fixed a crash that could be encountered when deleting 2D text and shapes from 2D graphs.
- Fixed the export of .efe and .hfe files to use the correct capitalisation for axis names so that these files can be interpreted correctly by PREFEKO.
- Improved the handling of custom imported data containing axes in radians. The values are now correctly converted to degrees when plotting the data on a Cartesian or polar graph and using trace maths.
Solver
Features
- Improved the accuracy of the ray tracing phase of a Faceted UTD simulation for some models.
- General speed improvements were made to the implementation of the faceted UTD and parallel scaling was improved.
- Accelerated the ray tracing of the wedge diffraction phase of faceted UTD solutions.
Resolved Issues
- For the MLFMM run with MPI, only switch to out-of-core MUMPS with the hybrid MPI/OpenMP approach introduced with Feko 2022.2 if it is estimated that this will lead to a sufficient reduction of in-core memory to compute the numerical factorisation. Continue in-core otherwise, since out-of-core can have a severe performance penalty.
- Resolved a deadlock that occurred during a the preconditioning phase of a parallel MLFMM simulation on a machine with low hard disk space.
- Resolved an issue with the spatial-peak SAR calculation in a model having both MoM and FEM.
- Improved the performance of the solution preparation phase of an RL-GO simulation of models with a large number of observation points.
- Fixed a bug in the calculation of the normal vectors to the aperture faces of a Cartesian boundary near field receiving antenna. A consistent outward normal should be used.
- Corrected the reported memory requirements of the equivalent MoM matrix when solving a model using ACA.
Shared Interface Changes
Support Components
Features
- Added the export of annotation data from a polar and Cartesian graph to the HyperStudy extraction script. This allows values from annotations on POSTFEKO graphs to be used as values for optimisation without additional maths and setup in HyperStudy.
- Updated example C5 in the Example Guide to use the new periodic structures features in CADFEKO.
- Added auto-detection for near fields in a cylindrical coordinate system to the Import DRE application macro.
- Corrected a figure in the Feko User Guide that shows how to define a mask for optimisation. The values filled in on the dialog did not reflect that the frequency for the example was in GHz.
- Restored the Create Rough Sea Surface application macro to CADFEKO.
Resolved Issues
- Fixed the loading of CADFEKO models on Linux for the getting started GS4 and example guide A11.1 and A11.2 macros.
- Corrected expression evaluation for the inputs for the Parameter Sweep: Create Models application macro so that inputs no longer need to be numeric, but can include expressions.
- Added validation to detect if there are missing result files (.bof) before combining the data for a parameter sweep run. The missing files are ignored, and the available data is merged as normal.
- Added validation in the Parameter Sweep: Create Models application macro to report an error if the model path contains utf8 characters.
- Added validation the HyperStudy-Feko interface so that if meshing fails (for example if legacy CADFEKO is incorrectly called using an incompatible CADFEKO model) error feedback is given.
WinProp 2022.2.1 Release Notes
The most notable extensions and improvements to WinProp are listed by component.
ProMan
Features
- Antenna phase is now considered for transmitters in the .apa format.
Resolved Issues
- Improved the stability of SBR predictions by eliminating a rare local randomness in ordering of scattered rays.
- Resolved an issue that may sometimes lead to the application hanging after cancelling a multi-threaded indoor IRT prediction.
- Resolved an issue that led to a mismatch between field strength values associated with rays and the received power computed at a mobile station for some full polarimetric projects.
- Resolved an issue related to moving time-variant objects when a value of zero is assigned to the velocity of two or more consecutive steps of an object's dynamics.
- Ray information can now be displayed for all time steps in a time-variant urban project.
- Resolved an issue with the format of ASCII network-planning results in projects with multiple prediction trajectories.
- Reactivated the writing of a results log file.
WallMan
Resolved Issues
- Resolved a crash during conversion of a GeoTIFF database where the y-coordinate of the lower-left corner is larger than that of the upper-right corner.
AMan
Resolved Issues
- Resolved a bug that could result in inaccurate beam elevation when forming a 3D pattern from a vertical and a horizontal 2D pattern using .msi files.
- Improved the accuracy of generated antenna beams and envelope patterns when large elevation angles were requested.
newFASANT 2022.2.1 Release Notes
The most notable extensions and improvements to newFASANT are listed by component.
Solver
Resolved Issues
- Resolved an issue that could affect bistatic RCS calculation for certain points within the GTD-PO module.
WRAP 2022.2.1 Release Notes
The most notable extensions and improvements to WRAP are listed by component.
General
Features
- Set the default clutter option for the Aeronautical Interference tool to “No extra clutter loss” to avoid long computation times.
- Accelerated the time diagram calculations for satellites.
Resolved Issues
- Fixed a bug that could reduce the resolution of the maps and results when the Global Human Settlement population database was used.
- Corrected the determination of the path type (terrestrial/spatial) in the Interference tool for satellites.
- Corrected the EER value for the ITU-R P.452 model when Worst-month prediction is selected.
- Updated API messages with TgTuRatio element where thus far the old element TgTsRatio had been used.
WRAP MapDataManager
Features
- Added an error message for attempted conversion of GeoTIFF raster data with unsupported very-high resolution. Support for higher resolutions may be added in the Feko 2023 release.
Resolved Issues
- Fixed an incorrect DTED conversion of negative values.
WRAP CoordMan
Resolved Issues
- Added a confirmation window when the default country is changed.