Below are the questions asked during the live event, along with their respective answers.
Q: Can the 3D simulation model magnetic materials? What are the assumptions on materials modeling in general?
A: Yes, in fact there are many sophisticated material models that can be applied to your geometry. Simple models can be applied and used as a first order approximation, or you can input frequency dependent permittivity, permeability and conductivity values, anisotropic materials, specialized materials for modeling complex stack-ups like carbon fiber composites, and so on. Materials modeling is one of the most important factors in achieving simulation and measurement correlation, so it’s important to know that there are many possibilities and this correlation has been demonstrated time and time again to validate the results. You can find many examples on the CST website, or contact our Support team if you have a more in depth, specific question.
Q: How long would it take a typical user to reach even the first level of effectiveness with such 3D simulation software? Or, how does the user expedite the learning curve?
A: Some exposure to 3D modeling capability is definitely helpful and will provide a jump-start. But even brand new users with no prior experience are usually able to pick up the software very quickly, due to its ease of use. New customers typically attend a training class, varying 2-3 days, and you can always contact our technical support team and application engineers for help while using a maintained license of the software. Our Application Engineers are experts in their respective fields, and we pride ourselves on providing fast and thorough support to our customers. We truly enjoy helping them learn how to use our software and simulation in general to improve their designs and products.
It will depend on how often you’re using the tool, but we do see engineers become effective within a few weeks or a couple of months. Of course, jump-start support and training can be provided, and dedicated engineering services are also available. There are many resources such as getting started manuals, built in examples and many webinars/eSeminars on specific topics, some of which are tutorial based and show the practical usage of the software for a given application. Please visit the eSeminars archive for a preview: https://www.cst.com/events/eseminars/archive.
Q: Is there any feature built in to compare results of the simulation to typical EMC standards, like CISPR, ISO, etc.?
A: Many features have been developed and implemented specifically with EMC in mind. Project templates can be selected based on your specific workflow, for example conducted emissions vs. radiated emissions and so on. Furthermore, there are built in Macros and Post Processing templates for viewing the results and comparing to specific standards and/or limits, which can also be edited or others can be implemented by the user with VBA. The tool provides a lot of flexibility to the user for these purposes.
Q: What are the 3D simulation rendering times typically? Don’t we need very expensive hardware in order to crunch the numbers?
A: The software and hardware have both advanced significantly over the years, such that these types of simulations can be run on the order of minutes to a few hours, for models of the complexity shown in this webinar. It is of course dependent on the size and complexity of the model, but also dependent on the hardware available to you. Most numerical methods take advantage of multiple CPU cores, some can be accelerated via GPUs or graphics processing units, and parallelization of different machines, either with multi-CPU or multi-GPU, is also possible. So, the hardware can become expensive, but the savings in time and increased efficiency in running simulations is well worth it. Please see our website for an introduction to recommended hardware: https://www.cst.com/products/csts2/hardwarerecommendation.