Importing the 3D antenna structure or radiation pattern from CST to MATLAB

Good morning everyone, I have a problem I would like to solve.

In MATLAB's ray tracing simulations I need to import an antenna that I built in CST.

The options I see are to export the 3D antenna structure, or export the radiation pattern of the antenna.

Regarding exporting the 3D structure, I found problems with CustomAntennaStl() as it imports the whole antenna as metal not respecting the air parts and the various dielectric substrates.

Can this be fixed?

For importing the radiation diagrams from the CST, I can export them to a .csv file, but then how do I integrate them within the Ray Tracing simulation?

Answer 1

[Maneet Kaur Bagga]

Hi LEONARDO,

As per my understanding, for exporting the 3D antenna structure the "customAntennaStl" function expects a single layer of metal surface, the alternate way would be to export the antenna as a gerber and then import into Antenna Toolbox, this way the information about the metal layers and the dielectric and other materials is retained.

The possible workaround for the second option which is exporting the radiation pattern of the antenna could be:

To export the radiation pattern of the antenna to a .csv file from CST, import the data into MATLAB and use it to define the "far-field" radiation pattern of the antenna within the ray tracing simulation. Please refer to the following steps for the same:

• Read the .csv file into MATLAB using functions like readtable or csvread.
• Extract the relevant data, which typically includes the theta and phi angles along with the corresponding radiation pattern values (gain, directivity, etc.).
• Use the extracted data to create a custom antenna element in MATLAB using "antenna.CustomAntennaElement" which allows to define the radiation pattern based on the imported data.
• Integrate this custom antenna element into the ray tracing simulation, which allows to simulate the antenna's performance in a multipath environment using the actual radiation pattern from CST.

Please refer to the following MATLAB Documentation for better understanding of the gerber files:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/rfpcb/ref/gerberwrite.html

Hope this helps!