2018 Altair Feko Student Competition Announces Winner

Altair announces that Didier Goulet-Tran, an undergraduate student from Polytechnique Montreal, Canada, is the winner of the 2018 Altair Feko Student Competition.

"It is so inspiring to see the innovative thinking of these students with our software,” saiysMatthias Goelke, senior director, business development academic markets, Altair. “The students gain valuable experience with Feko, our computational electromagnetic (CEM) tool, a world-leader in the EM field for the automotive, aerospace, defence, communications, consumer electronics, energy, and healthcare industries. This also helps their future engineering careers.”

Goulet-Tran’s entry used Feko to design planar reflect array antenna, where the whole antenna system can be folded on one side of the satellite and saving space for CubeSat application. The challenge in the design of reflect array is to choose the shape of the printed surfaces to form a collimated beam over a reasonable bandwidth. The designed reflect array was fabricated and its performance validated using measurements in anechoic chamber achieving a bandwidth of 6.5%.

“I am very pleased that the judges recognized my work and I wish to thank everyone who was involved during this project. This prize will be a source of motivation for years to come," says Goulet-Tran on receiving the news of his win.

“I think it is a great achievement for an undergraduate student to win this competition," Professor Jean-Jacques Laurin, Didier’s advisor comments. "We have used Altair Feko in many of our academic research projects as well as in the classroom and will continue to do so for years to come.”

The two honourable mentions were Vignesh Manohar from University of California-Los Angeles, CA, and Sumitra Dey from University of Missouri, Kansas City, MO.

This annual international contest organized in support of engineering education and academic excellence, has been running for 16 years and continues to generate global interest, attracting entries from Argentina, Australia, Canada and the United States this year. The competition is designed for students interested in antennas, microwave devices, bio-electromagnetics, electromagnetic compatibility and other electromagnetic related fields and gives them the opportunity to showcase their work with electromagnetics solver Feko, part of the Altair HyperWorks suite.

The winning project titled, “Design, fabrication and characterization of a K band reflect array antenna for use in a “CubeSat” application,” and the honourable mentions are available for download via this link.

Details about the newly revised 2019 Feko Student Competition will be announced early in March 2019 on the Altair University website.

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Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.