How to set up dielectrics in PO calculations

paulgrimes
paulgrimes Altair Community Member
edited October 2020 in Community Q&A

I'm trying to evaluate the use of FEKO for simulating a refracting millimeter wave telescopes - these will have ~ 500 mm diameter lenses, for operation from 30-300 GHz (different lenses and AR coatings for different bands), so lens diameters from 50 to 500 wavelengths.

As a first step to understanding FEKO, I'm trying to run the dielectric lens example with PO instead of RL-GO. However, I can't get the fields to propagate through the lens, despite trying several different settings for the face materials, including both dielectric boundaries and adding a layered dielectric 1/4 lambda AR coating with a dielectric constant set to the square root of the lens material.  In all cases, the currents on the far surface of the lens turn out to be zero, and there's no forward gain from the lens antenna, telling me that the lens is acting as a PEC rather than a dielectric. I've also truncated the lens slightly so that there aren't wedges at the edge of it.

 

What face and solver settings should be used to carry out a PO calculation of a dielectric with transmission through the dielectric?

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Answers

  • paulgrimes
    paulgrimes Altair Community Member
    edited January 2020

    The answer I received to this from Altair support is that the PO calculation method will not propagate signal through a dielectric, although it will calculate scattering from a dielectric.  This means I've had to go back to TICRA GRASP to carry out PO of lenses, or to downgrade to the RL-GO method to calculate the system in FEKO - how much of downgrade this is I need to study.

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