Microwave Engineering and

Antennas

OPEN EMS (alternative for CST)

Short Guide

Bart Smolders, Professor

Ulf Johannsen, Assistant Professor
Gabriele Federico, PhD student
Department of Electrical Engineering
Center for Wireless Technology Eindhoven
 About Open EMS

• When CST student versioen is not available for you, you can use Open EMS as an alternative for antenna simulations

• Open EMS is a free and open-source electromagnetic field solver using the FDTD method

• Fully 3D Cartesian and cylindrical coordinates graded mesh

• MATLAB (or Octave) is used as an easy and flexible scripting interface

• Multi-threading, SIMD (SSE) and MPI support for high speed FDTD

• For a more extensive overview on Open EMS visit the following link:
https://openems.de/index.php/OpenEMS#Features
 Open EMS: Start

1. Visit the page:

https://openems.de/start/

2. Click on Win 64bit to download the

most recent version for Windows*

3. Download the open EMS folder:

And unzip to a folder of your choice

* If the latest version does not work try to download an older version
 Open EMS: Install

• Open the unzipped folder:

Example, tutorials and useful
MATLAB functions are included

• As example click on Patch_Antenna.m

• Add open EMS to MATLAB

Indicating the path of Open EMS

folder
Patch Antenna (most relevant parameters)

You can disable the 3d pattern Define FDTD

plot with ‘0’
parameters

Max Timesteps
Define the right boundary
conditions (see next slide)

Define patch
geometries and
Substrate material properties
Loss tangent
Boundary Condition in Open EMS
In Open EMS 4 the boundary conditions can be defined as follows:

•PEC: Perfect electric conductor (default BC)

•PMC: Perfect magnetic conductor

•MUR: A simple absorbing boundary condition

•PML_x: Perfectly Matched Layer absorbing boundary condition, using x number of cells
 Mesh cells
You can define here the number of mesh cells per wavelength. In
this case they are 20 mesh cells per wavelength

Rule of thumb

The largest mesh cell must not be bigger than about a tenth of the smallest wavelength.
𝜆𝜆𝑚𝑚𝑚𝑚𝑚𝑚
Better: max Δ𝑥𝑥, 𝑦𝑦, 𝑧𝑧 < 15

More info @ https://openems.de/index.php/FDTD_Mesh.html

 Ports and Field excitation
Define the type of port and the port position

Ports are macro function that combine e.g. current and voltage probes, field excitations and other necessary properties and
primitives.

General layout (example):

[CSX port] = Add...Port(CSX, prio, port_number, <a list of port dependent parameters>)

In many cases you may want to create more than one port, e.g. to calculate the reflection and transmission parameters. In this
case it is a good idea to create a cell array of port structures.
Example:
% port 1 (maybe active) [CSX port{1}] = Add...Port(CSX, prio, 1, <a list of port dependent parameters>)
% port 2 (maybe passive) [CSX port{2}] = Add...Port(CSX, prio, 2, <a list of port dependent parameters>)

Three different types of ports:

• Concentrated ports (such as the lumped or curve port)
• Transmission line ports
• Waveguide ports More info @ https://openems.de/index.php/Ports.html
 Visualization of the model
Once the code is complete you can run the script

A window showing the design

will appear.
If everything is as expected
you can close the window and
the calculation will start.
Simulation Results feed point impedance
reflection coefficient S
11
50 0

real
imag
40
-5

30

|
11
/ Ohm
-10
20

reflection coefficient |S
in
impedance Z
10
-15

-20
-10

-20 -25
1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000 2200 2400 2600 2800 3000 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000 2200 2400 2600 2800 3000

frequency f / MHz frequency f / MHz

far field pattern @ f = 2.372000e+09 Hz

10

phi = 0.0
phi = 90.0

0
directivity (dBi)

-5

-10

-15

-20
-200 -150 -100 -50 0 50 100 150 200
theta (deg)