Updated Sep. 8
th
, 2005
I-4
1.1. MATLAB Antenna Toolbox
This text describes the Method of Moments based software – called the MATLAB
Antenna Toolbox (MAT) – for the modeling of basic metal-dielectric antennas and
resonators. The MAT uses the Method of Moments, the LAPACK matrix solvers
compiled in the MATLAB environment, and the built-in MATLAB 3D mesh generators.
The MAT is limited to about 7,000 unknowns (metal plus dielectric). Driven solution
with a voltage gap feed, scattering solution, and eigenmode solution are currently
included.
The present software is reasonably accurate for the simple patch antennas and
cavity resonators. At the same time, it cannot compete with existing commercial
FEM/FDTD codes such as Ansoft HFSS or others. The software is applicable to basic
antenna configurations when a fast and reasonably accurate solution is required. The
MAT is mostly intended for educational purposes and is supported by the NSF
CCLI:EMD grant 0231312.
The MAT software and this manual are subject to change and extension. The most
recent version can be found at http://ece.wpi.edu/mom/.
1.2. Organization of the text and MAT software
The text includes
i. ten basic antenna application examples (Chapters 1-4)
ii. full software description (Chapters 1-7, 9, Appendix A)
iii. underlying MoM theory (Chapters 5-9) including the convergence tests.
The application examples make up about 70% of the manual. The individual MATLAB
codes are documented in the help text at the beginning of every code file. Almost every
example is accompanied by a related Ansoft HFSS FEM solution, is compared to the
corresponding experimental data, or is compared to another solution. The related Ansoft
HFSS projects are also included in the downloadable codes. The list of examples is given
below in Table 1. Every example uses the same MATLAB code, but with a different
geometry and different frequency/far-field conditions.
