https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47592
Bug ID: 47592 Summary: HFSS antenna modelling software running but erroneous output ! Product: Wine Version: 3.0.2 Hardware: x86 OS: Linux Status: UNCONFIRMED Severity: normal Priority: P2 Component: -unknown Assignee: wine-bugs@winehq.org Reporter: friedtj@free.fr Distribution: ---
I wanted to share with this community a rather amazing observation that has been baffling me for the last week: ANSYS HFSS 13.02 is running with Wine, but the output is erroneous ! I can hardly imagine how a calculation can be completed but yield incorrect results: my understanding is that a library (or API implementation) either works or does not -- and to tell the truth I did not expect such a complex piece of software as HFSS to run on Wine -- but it does and rather nicely except to the point of analyzing the results.
Being new to HFSS but quite familiar with antenna design, I started with the trivial test case of the dipole antenna: resonance frequency was close to the expected value considering the dimensions, so the software must be working properly since it computes admittances (see http://jmfriedt.org/S11both.pdf, green curve) which are consistent with the values given by (FOSS) NEC2 and GPRMax3D. However all attempts to plot the radiation pattern failed (no plot at all, or sometimes inconsistent results of an isotropic radiator with no null), and radiation efficiency was consistently 0 (a poor result for a classical antenna), so I was of course questioning my ability to understand the proper operation of the software. After attempting all possible solutions, I ended up installing a Win7 system on VirtualBox for testing, and to my amazement the software yields the proper radiation diagram (http://jmfriedt.org/diagramme_3D.png) and slightly different reflection coefficients (http://jmfriedt.org/S11both.pdf, purple curve), the difference being emphasized on the impedance curve (http://jmfriedt.org/Z11_both.pdf).
I am of course not blaming the amazing emulator on this difference, but with this post 1/ may point out a subtle misbehavior of one of the computation library used by Wine 2/ help others attempting to run HFSS on Wine question the results they achieve.
These tests were completed with wine-3.0.2 as provided by Debian GNU/Linux Unstable at the time of writing this post, configured (winecfg) either as Win10 or Win7, fresh install with no other MS-Windows or proprietary library installed prior to HFSS (clean $HOME/.wine directory).
Not sure how I can help debug, best wishes, Jean-Michel