TROY, Mich., March 30 2015 - Altair announced today that engineering students from across the globe are once again invited to compete in the popular FEKO Student Competition. The competition is open to all under-graduate and post-graduate students who work on a supervised project in the area of electromagnetic engineering and make use of FEKO, Altair's comprehensive electromagnetic (EM) analysis software suite, included in HyperWorks®.

The competition is an ideal opportunity for students to showcase their work in FEKO and some attractive prizes are up for grabs – a state-of-the-art laptop computer or attendance to an Altair ATC or ATCx, conference series, which are hosted around the world each year.

“Since FEKO is now part of Altair HyperWorks, the competition is being launched through the Altair academic website (www.altairuniversity.com) which provides us with a much larger audience so we are expecting the competition to be even more popular than in the past,” explains Gronum Smith, Marketing Director EM Solutions at Altair. “We receive entries from all over the world and have had winners from England, USA, Spain, South Africa and Italy since the competition began in 2003.”

"By using FEKO the students gain experience with a leading CEM tool that is widely used in industry. This experience will be very useful in their future engineering careers,” explains Altair Business Development Director of Academic Markets, Dr Matthias Goelke.

Gastón Ezequiel Pérez, a final year electronic engineering student from the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, Facultad Regional Buenos Aires, Argentina, won the 2014 FEKO Student Competition.

Mr. Pérez' winning entry, entitled Design of a Patch Antenna Array for Beamforming Combined with Metamaterials at 5.8 GHz, described the systematic design of a planar array system and how each design decision was informed by electromagnetic simulation. The goal was to provide a solution for satellite applications that require the on-board antenna to be low profile, high gain, and dynamically orientable while adhering to strict weight and volume constraints. Phased signals were used for beamforming, eliminating the drawback of requiring a change in mechanical parts to reorient the radiation pattern. Students should register at www.altairuniversity.com . Once registered the participants will receive further details on requirements, links to support forums, and guides. Deadline for entries is 30 September 2015. More information can be found on the Altair University website.

“We are happy to announce that FEKO has now been added to the Altair Support Forum. Here students can discuss any issues they experience with FEKO, in real-time, whilst working on any of their projects. Our support engineers around the world are active on the forum so there is always someone available to answer any questions. This hands-on support is invaluable to students and we encourage them to register at http://forum.altairhyperworks.com/” adds Matthias.