Big Release of Electromagnetic Simulation Software

Altair Engineering has released the 2018 versions of its electromagnetic force (EM) simulation software FEKO, WinProp, Flux and FluxMotor. Widely deployed in the design process in such industries as aerospace, automotive, defense, communications, consumer electronics, energy and healthcare, these EM solver tools are part of Altair’s HyperWorks comprehensive open-architecture simulation suite. The set of features in the 2018 release of these HyperWorks EM simulation solutions, Altair says, broadens functionality, simplifies workflows and enhances the user experience.

FEKO, a comprehensive computational EM solution, provides several frequency and time domain EM solvers. Hybridization of these methods, the company explains, enables the efficient analysis of a broad spectrum of EM problems, including antennas, microstrip circuits, RF (radio frequency) components and biomedical systems.

Altair Engineering has released the 2018 version of its electromagnetic (EM) simulation software suite. Shown here is an adaptive cruise control (ACC) radar system in a bumper with paint layer. Image courtesy of Altair Engineering Inc.

The company reports that FEKO 2018 implements a novel workflow that facilitates characterizing multilayered dielectrics. Altair explains that this functionality enables users to compute transmission loss and bore-sight error for arbitrarily shaped radomes more efficiently and with greater flexibility. Additionally, version 2018 introduces various improvements for cable modeling, including the ability to define a reference direction for a cable path and a new cable cross-section mesh library.

Beginning with FEKO 2018 the WinProp wave propagation modeling toolset is included with the FEKO HyperWorks installation. A new “FEKO + WinProp” launcher utility reduces the number of Windows icons onscreen and contains options to launch the various FEKO and WinProp components. Other new features include characterized surfaces for the ray-launching geometrical optics (RL-GO) solver, which is said to “greatly” speed up RL-GO analysis of complex multilayer structures.

Altair says that the 2018 edition of its Flux electromagnetic and thermal simulation software brings new capabilities for CAD geometry simplification and meshing that improve workflows and solve faster in 3D using new HPC (high-performance computing) resources. Improvements introduced in Flux 2018 offer a tight focus on large 3D models with eddy currents. New mathematical formulations are said to help the nonlinear convergence in such cases, particularly in the frequency domain.

Additionally, the Flux linear solver has been updated with the latest version of MUMPS (MUltifrontal Massively Parallel sparse direct Solver). This, according to the company, offers the possibility to use it in a distributed memory mode, allowing Flux to run on clusters with larger numbers of cores, which should bring “great accelerations for 3D models with large meshes.”

“We are excited by the latest release of our electromagnetic tools to support our customers as they move toward broad deployment of products relevant to e-mobility and communications, Industry 4.0 and the internet of things,” says Ulrich Jakobus, senior VP for EM Solutions at Altair in the release announcement. “The range of applications covers electromagnetic problems across the whole frequency range from DC into THz [terahertz], integrated within Altair’s multiphysics modeling environment for multidisciplinary system optimization.”

To learn more about the new features in FEKO 2018, go here.

Click on this link to see what’s new in Flux 2018.

See what’s new in WinProp 2018.

Watch on-demand webinars on the new features in Altair’s EM suite.

Learn more about FluxMotor.

See why DE‘s Editors selected Altair’s 2018 electromagnetics simulation suite release as their Pick of the Week.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.