Software

Electromagnetic Simulation Software with Characteristic Mode Feature

Thanks to increasing industrial interest in applying characteristic modes in their commercial developments, several major electromagnetic software vendors have now implemented this feature, including:

  • FEKO, Altair (since FEKO Suite 6.2, September 2012)
  • CST (since version 2016)
  • WIPL-D (since version 13)
  • ANSYS HFSS (since Release 18.1)

Lund University (thanks to Dr. Zachary Miers) has prepared video instructions on how to use the basic capabilities of the CM feature of these software:

Czech Technical University (CTU) in Prague has also released their electromagnetic software with CM features (both free and paid versions are available):

In-house Characteristic Mode Analysis Software

To promote the use of characteristic mode analysis (CMA) to solve antenna problems, Lund University released the basic version of its in-house Matlab-based CMA software (developed from Makarov’s Method of Moments Matlab code by Dr. Zachary Miers), as well as a video with step-by-step instructions on how to use the software. The video also includes instructions on how to build and mesh the simulation model using open source software FreeCAD and Gmsh, respectively.

Please note that Lund University cannot offer any user support for the in-house Matlab-based CMA software, neither can we guarantee its correctness. Use at your own risk.

As an alternative, Kapil Saraswat of Central University of Rajasthan, India is distributing another in-house CMA tool, which is C++ based. The presentation related to the CMA toolbox is available here and the video tutorial is available here. He also published a conference paper for performance evaluation of an in-house developed software tool for CMA which can be accessed from here. The software is divided into two parts, GUI (which is python based) and CMA kernel (C++ based and can be used independently as well as with GUI).