Altair FEKO 2022.1.1 HotFix

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

CADFEKO

Features
- Added support to define a characterised surface with a thickness as the face medium for faces solved with the MoM/MLFMM.
- Added CEM verification for the pitch length of twisted pair cables.
- Added CEM verification for geometrically thin coatings on mesh elements.
- Mouse Binding Settings are now ordered alphabetically and all view interactions can be customised.
- Converted three application macros from the CADFEKO [LEGACY] API to the new CADFEKO API.
- Extended the CADFEKO API by adding the getApplicationName method to the Application object to return the application's name.
- Extended the CADFEKO API by adding the getApplicationVersion method to the Application object to return the application's version information.
Resolved Issues
- Resolved a problem that could cause the application to hang when running an external process such as the Feko Solver from the GUI.
- Resolved a problem that could cause CADFEKO_BATCH to crash when called from the GUI.
- Resolved an issue that caused large spaces to be displayed in the output on the Executing runfeko dialog.
- Resolved an issue where CADFEKO wrongly passed process priority to RUNFEKO for sequential jobs.
- Made various corrections and improvements to the saving process, in particular, what files are saved when processes are still busy performing calculations.
- When opening .cfx files created in CADFEKO [LEGACY] or older versions of CADFEKO, the initial view will be zoomed to the extents of the model.
- Resolved various problems with the view not restoring correctly when re-opening a model.
◦ Tiled views are restored correctly when loading a model.
◦ The previously selected view is selected when loading a model.
◦ The zoom level is restored correctly when loading a model.
- Fixed a crash that could have resulted when closing all windows.
- Fixed a crash that could occur when applying changes on the Transform View dialog to a 3D view.
- The Transform View button is now correctly disabled on the ribbon for schematic views. Attempting to transform the view with a schematic view active caused the application to crash.
- Fixed a crash on Linux when zooming out in the cable harness schematic view.
- Resolved an issue where opening a model created in CADFEKO [LEGACY] or older versions of CADFEKO could open with a port having unconnected terminals in the schematic circuit.
- Resolved an issue where the dialog that indicates that the application is busy converting a legacy model was hidden behind the splash screen.
- Models with incorrect coaxial cable definitions or incorrect 3D anisotropic medium definitions may have resulted in an error while converting from a legacy model.
- Corrected a problem with number formatting where a decimal separator instead of a space was used as thousands separator.
- CAD fixing with the remove small feature tool, simplify part representation tool or the repair edge tool could have resulted in large faces being removed if the faces were inside solid regions and not touching any of the region boundaries.
- Resolved an assertion failing when removing rows from the Constrained Surface dialog.
- Fixed an assertion failure which occurred intermittently when opening the Create S-parameters dialog.
- Resolved an assertion failure when duplicating an S-parameter configuration that had no ports defined.
- Introduced more descriptive error messages when regions are unable to mesh.
- Resolved various problems creating FEM volume meshes with symmetry.
- Resolved an issue where cable ports were reported as non-symmetric.
- Fixed a problem where the wrong cable connector names were written to the CI card in the .pre file.
- Resolved an issue with cable ports not being imported during .cfx import.
- Prevented a crash when pressing Cancel on the Combine Cables dialog.
- Fixed model status validation reporting an error for an MTL cable harness where the cable path reference direction was correctly defined.
- Restored twenty three antennas to the component library that were previously only available in CADFEKO [LEGACY].
- Resolved an issue with the align tool being populated incorrectly when adding a component from the Component Library to an existing project.
- Creating a union of layered isotropic dielectric faces and anisotropic dielectric regions will no longer trigger an assert.
- Fixed a crash when saving a model with a suspect wire port.
- Resolved a crash when re-opening the project filter in the same session where settings were applied to the project filter while another model was open.
- Resolved an issue where an Unnamed error message dialog was shown instead of a pop-up error message when applying an invalid change on any dialog.
- Updated the geometry vertex rendering to only render the vertices and not extra vertices from tessellation.
- Fixed an assertion failure that was triggered when modifying multiple entities at the same time and a tri-state value was invalid or empty.
- Fixed a crash that occurred on Linux when modifying the properties on multiple faces
- Fixed a crash that occurred on Linux when modifying the numerical Green's function (NGF) settings.
- Fixed a failure when loading models created in CADFEKO [LEGACY] or older versions of CADFEKO containing subtracted geometry parts.
- Fixed mesh refinement rules not being applied when it has a non-default workplane set.
- Mesh overlay display is disabled while tools, other than those where mesh settings can be modified or mesh information is displayed, are open.
- Resolved an issue with Connectivity not displaying in the 3D view immediately upon being enabled.
- Resolved an issue with snap points being rendered in the 3D view when no snap points were expected or used.
- Improved the accuracy of windscreen work surface snapping to allow using point entry to create surface lines.
- Resolved an assertion that failed upon geometry modification of a wire referenced by a wire port, where the modification results in the wire becoming an edge.
- Prevented certain actions on child geometry parts through the GUI and API, including converting to primitive, exploding, reversing of normals and unlinking the mesh.
- Added validation to prevent an assertion failing when attempting to path sweep geometry along a disjoint path.
- Added validation to prevent the deletion of a local mesh setting definition that is used in the local mesh settings of a part.
- Resolved an issue where a view with two start pages could have resulted if a model failed to load, with the view being split into two sections. The application had to be restarted to return the view to normal.
- Saving the model is no longer part of the protect and unprotect model feature.
- Protected model validation incorrectly used solution methods on parts that are not root-level parts and could have incorrectly stated that a model cannot be validated.
- Resolved an assertion that failed when meshing a protected model with a larger model unit than the model it was imported into.
- Relaxed optimisation constraint validation so that validation is only done on active constraints.
- Use alphabetical ordering for optimisation collections under the Construction tab in the model tree.
- Resolved an issue where the cut of the cutplane was not facing the user by default.
- Corrected the orientation of the Theta and Phi angles when using rotation to define a cutplane.
- Removed unused options from the Geometry Importer Tool. ODB++ format can be imported using the PCB Import Tool. Gerber format is not currently supported.
- Resolved an issue with incomplete version information being written out to .pre file.
- Resolved a hang when opening a model that was created and saved using a script.
- Resolved an issue with the script editor where the full filename did not get displayed for filenames containing multiple full stops.
- Resolved a crash that could be triggered by clicking on the Close button on the application macro dialog while the macro is running.
- Added API support for updating multiple variables simultaneously using the Lua method SetExpressions.
- Resolved an issue where some collection methods were missing from the API documentation.
- Resolved an issue where table methods were not showing up in the API documentation.
- Resolved an issue where list methods did not have the correct capitalisation in the API documentation.

EDITFEKO

Feature
- Added support to the SK card to define a thickness for triangles using a characterised surface definition medium. The thickness is used for MoM/MLFMM simulations and is disregarded for RL-GO.

POSTFEKO

Feature
- Added the far field power integral result type to the Parameter Sweep: Combine Results application macro.
Resolved Issues
- Resolved a problem on Windows that prevented image exports. An error message stated that the postscript driver was not found.
- Added validation to the Optimise Model in HyperStudy macro to avoid executing the Feko solver when the variables in a model did not update correctly.

Solver

Features
- Accelerated the ray tracing phase of faceted UTD simulations of models with a large number of reflection paths or a large number of interactions. The performance gains depend on the geometry of the model and/or the location of the source.
- Upgraded MUMPS to version 5.5.0.
- Improved further both the memory and time requirements when calculating Green's function interpolation tables for specific cases.
- Relaxed an error condition when near field aperture samples are close to zero.
Resolved Issues
- Print a note that power scaling settings are not effective in characteristic mode analysis.
- A warning about suppressing surface current export is now only issued if the current request includes UTD, faceted UTD or RL-GO triangles.
- Resolved an issue with reporting very high permittivity and permeability values in the .out file.

Support Components

Features
- Enabled HyperStudy to work with the new CADFEKO 2022.1.
- Updated the steps for the HyperStudy Example I.3 in the Feko Example Guide to use the model creation script in the macro library.
Resolved Issue
- When launching a parallel simulation across multiple nodes using Intel MPI, the correct number of processes will now be started on each node according to the configuration.

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

ProMan

Features
- Popup windows with information regarding the lack of intersection between walls of a database and the prediction plane are no longer issued when ProMan simulations are launched from the command line.
- ProMan projects can optionally be exported without the database.
- Extended Postprocessing incl. Tx and Rx to moving antenna arrays.
- UWB air interface is now supported for urban and rural scenarios.
- Resolved an issue with importing a .msi file that has multiple dots in the file name.
Resolved Issues
- Prevented a crash in ProMan in case a trajectory is placed outside the area of the topographical map.
- Improved indoor LOS correction for projects with time-variance, prediction points or planes.
- An explanatory error message will now be issued when a time-variant transmitter moves outside the available topography area.
- Resolved an issue where normalization of channel matrices was not carried out correctly for some cases.
- .kml files are now always exported with Longitude/Latitude coordinates for all scenarios.
- Corrected the display of VNLOS and VLOS pixels in some projects (V=Vegetation).

WallMan

Feature
- WallMan now accepts thickness and roughness of a material specified in micrometers.
Resolved Issues
- Fixed a case where only part of a GeoTIFF topography file was converted.
- Outdoor pixels are now computed when an indoor project is computed with IRT.
- Fixed a case where invalid wedges or segments were created for Urban IRT at locations where buildings connect and parallel walls essentially form one wall.

Application Programming Interface

Feature
- Prevented dialog windows related to geometry conversion from appearing when the conversion is performed through the API.