Report Guidelines

1. When you define a frequency sweep to analyze the performance of the antenna over a certain frequency range, for example, in the horn antenna example you may need to do a frequency sweep from 712 GHz. The thing to take care of it that you need to choose the solution frequency to be the higher than the highest frequency in your range. Thus, you may take it to be 12GHz or even more (15GHz) if your computation power permits so. This is because, the meshing points are chosen by the program based on the wavelength. Hence, you must choose the solution frequency to be the highest frequency that will yield the lowest wavelength in order for your solution to be accurate at all the required frequency range. 2. How to choose the solution box dimensions? Since you will use the radiation boundary condition, HFSS recommends that the walls of the solution box to be at least quarter wavelength away from your antenna (the wavelength in this case is chosen as the worst case wavelength (largest) which occurs at the lowest frequency in your frequency range). You may consult HFSS help on the radiation boundary condition for more information. In this case, the solution box as well as the number of meshing points will increase considerably and you may not be able to simulate the structure on your computer. To overcome this problem, you will need to exploit the symmetry boundary condition to split the problem in half. You may consult HFSS help on the symmetry boundary condition for more information. I attached an example on monopole antenna in which a (symmetry-H) boundary condition is used. This is because we know for the monopole that the H-field is in the -direction and hence there is no tangential component for the H-field on the =constant plane. The impedance multiplier value is adjusted accordingly. 3. How to plot the directivity as a function of frequency? Since, the directivity is a far field quantity then you have to follow the following steps a. Choose HFSS Radiation Insert far field setup Infinite sweep. and adjust the required resolution in the and directions.

b. Adjust your frequency sweep to be either discrete or fast (according to the required accuracy) and make sure the save fields option is chosen. c. After simulation is done, choose HFSS Results create far field report rectangular plot. Then follow the shown figures
1 2 X-axis is now the frequency

Direction of the main beam according to my coordinate system

Any other far field quantity (at any required frequency) can be plotted similarly.

4. How to calculate the 3dB bandwidth? A typical S11 plot for a certain antenna is shown below
Ansoft Corporation XY Plot 1 a paran ring mono symmetry

0.00
dB(S(WavePort1,WavePort1))

-5.00

-10.00

f1= 2.38GHz

f2= 4.1GHz

-15.00
S11 plot

-20.00

-25.00 0.00

1.00

2.00

3.00 Freq [GHz]

4.00

5.00
Curve Info

according to this figure, the 3dB bandwidth = f2-f1 = 1.72 GHz