It is our pleasure to announce that the next version of TICRA Tools is now out: TICRA Tools 23.0 has just been released!

This release brings many new features and enhancements to all TICRA Tools products. Some highlights are:

• GRASP: PO analysis of reflectors defined in CAD files
• GRASP, ESTEAM, CHAMP 3D, and QUPES: Selecting faces to exclude or include in a CAD File from the GUI
• CHAMP 3D: Modelling of Profiled Ridge Horns
• QUPES: New PUC “Periodic Unit Cell Planar Scatterer”
• All products: New optimisation goals

With this release, working with CAD files in TICRA Tools has thus been made easier and more intuitive. Find more details on all highlighted features below.

With an active Technical Support and Maintenance (TSM) contract you may download TICRA Tools 23.0 on the TICRA support site. Here, you also find the release note with all details on the new features, enhancements, and bug fixes.

If you would like to renew your TSM agreement, please contact us.

GRASP: PO analysis of reflectors defined in CAD files

In the new version of TICRA Tools it is possible to analyse reflectors defined in CAD Files with PO by using the class PO, Multi-face Scatterer. This provides users with a more convenient way of importing reflector surfaces from external sources, such as CAD design tools or thermo-mechanical software. This is particularly useful, for example, if the effects of thermo-elastic deformations are to be investigated, or if a reflector surface has been manipulated by the mechanical engineers to accommodate it on the spacecraft.

 

GRASP, ESTEAM, CHAMP 3D, and QUPES: Selecting faces to exclude or include in a CAD File from the GUI

Faces in CAD files imported for use in ESTEAM, GRASP, CHAMP 3D, or QUPES may now be included or excluded from the model by direct manipulation of the CAD file in the GUI. This is an alternative to editing the Exclude Faces and Include-Only Faces attributes in the CAD File scatterer, and the possibility to work directly in the GUI will make modifying CAD File-based models faster and more intuitive.

CHAMP 3D: Modelling of Profiled Ridge Horns

A number of new devices have been implemented to facilitate the analysis and optimisation of double and quad ridge horns.

With the waveguide device Profiled Ridge Horn or the aperture device Profiled Ridge Aperture it is possible to define the horn walls as well as ridges using the existing Horn Profiles classes. It is also possible to define just the horn walls, without the ridges, to obtain, for instance, a profiled rectangular horn. The Coaxial to Waveguide Adapter can be applied to excite the horn with a coaxial port. Also, the new device Tapered Shorted Waveguide can be used to obtain wideband matching of the coaxial adapter.

QUPES: New PUC “Periodic Unit Cell Planar Scatterer”

In this TICRA Tools release, we have included a new Periodic Unit Cell (PUC) “Periodic Unit Cell Planar Scatterer”. The PUC is defined by a planar scatterer object from the “Antennas and Scatterers” tab. This means that the PUC geometry may consist of a single or multiple scatterer components from the built-in scatterer library in TICRA Tools. By combining different scatterers, complex user-defined geometries can be created.

The introduction of the new PUC greatly enhances the process of creating user-defined planar unit-cell geometries and significantly improves the usability of QUPES.

All products: New optimisation goals

A new optimisation goal for the far-field peak direction, “Peak Direction”, is available in this version of TICRA Tools. This goal is particularly useful when optimising feed positions in reflector antennas for wide beam scanning (peak to be scanned to a position several sidelobes away from the original peak), or for rotating antennas to achieve a peak in a given direction.

Another new far-field goal, ”Efficiency”, is also available in this version of TICRA Tools, which can be used to optimise the beam efficiency of antennas. The beam efficiency is calculated by integrating the power inside a certain angular region of the far field. This region can either be given relative to the peak of the pattern (e.g., inside the -3 dB pattern contour), or as a fixed rectangular or elliptical region in the far-field grid.