Concerto 7.5: High Frequency Electromagnetic Design Software
The latest version the Concerto software includes a number of developments that increase the capability and improve the usability of the software.
Among the enhancements are:
- Bulk material properties for metamaterials
- Dispersive lumped ports
- Frequency domain field monitors
- Swept frequency far-field antenna parameters
- Mosaic meshing option for eigenvalue models
- Concerto Manager and Optimizer improvements
- Enhanced Command File Editor and Command Language
For more information or to order now please contact sales at vectorfields.sales@cobham.com or call us on +44 (0) 1865 370151.
For information on installing or upgrading to Concerto 7.5R2 please click here.
Metamaterial Simulation
Bulk Material Properties
The properties of metamaterials are being explored increasingly for use in microwave devices such as antennas and filters. Metamaterials generally rely on periodic small-scale structure for their desired electromagnetic characteristics, and as the physical size of the device increases, representing these features explicitly in the geometry can lead to computationally intensive simulations. However, the FDTD solver in Concerto now supports the representation of metamaterials by their dispersive bulk material properties, greatly increasing the speed of simulation.
Dispersive lumped ports
For some novel material structures it is still more appropriate to model the structure as an array of individual elements. In these instances, advantage may be gained from replacing the geometry by a lumped impedance element. In addition to individual resistive, capacitive and inductive elements, and series and parallel RLC networks, Concerto now includes dispersive networks based on the Drude, Lorentz and Debye representations in FDTD simulations.
Frequency Domain Field Monitors
Concerto’s FDTD simulator is most often run with a time domain pulse excitation, allowing device performance characteristics, such as S- parameters and radiation patterns, to be determined over a range of frequencies. Frequency domain processing has now been extended to include the near fields, allowing visualization of results at multiple frequencies and on multiple planes in the model.
Swept Frequency Far-Field Antenna Parameters
A common application for Concerto is in the design of antennas. A new tool in the Modeller enables swept far-field results to be generated by the FDTD solver in arbitrary directions, giving the ability to assess the broad-band far-field performance both on and off boresight.
Mosaic Meshing
The Concerto suite includes the finite element eigenvalue solver, Soprano. In previous versions, the solver used only tetrahedral finite elements, but now, a new mesh generator can provide a mixed mesh of hexahedral, prismatic and tetrahedral elements - termed ‘mosaic meshing’. For many geometries, mosaic meshing can give significant advantages over the tetrahedral-only mesh in terms of improved reliability, accuracy and computational speed.
Concerto Manager and Optimizer
The Concerto Manager provides the top-level interface with the software. It performs a range of functions, including file management and navigation, option selections, licence set-up, batch processing of Concerto frequency domain simulations and launch of other Concerto modules. The Concerto Manager has been modified for improved usability, and now features tabbed folder windows for simpler and faster navigation.
The Manager also administers the VF Optimizer, which is may be used in conjunction with the Soprano eigenvalue solver and the CLASP Method of Moments solver. The Optimizer has been extensively modified to improve reliability and accuracy for finding optimal designs. A key aspect of this is the ability to handle the many jobs that may be automatically created during an optimization, and which are run using the Concerto Manager’s batch facility.
Enhanced Command File Editor and Command Language
Underlying Concerto is an advanced and flexible scripting capability, allowing automation of almost all of the features of model creation analysis and post processing.
Concerto automatically generates command (.comi) files containing a record of the commands used within a design process. With little effort these files may be customised to facilitate structured engineering management that can include quality assurance and a high level of automation for subsequent design iterations.
For the release of Concerto 7.5R2 we have made improvements in the flexibility and ease of use of the command language as well as adding a whole host of new features. These include:
- Automatic equation solving
- A new (easier) way to create user variables
- Scoped (local) variables
- Cycling a loop
- Exiting a loop ignoring any intervening commands
- Using Concerto dialogs in Command Files
- Increased limits of character string lengths
- Longer commands and responses
- Longer labels and names