There are many theories out there to explain the behavior of electronic circuits and electromagnetic waves. When it comes to visualization though, most of us had to make do with our lecturer’s very good blackboard scribbles or some illustrations from the textbook. (Sam A) is working on some glorious animated simulations, however, Which shows us various phenomena in a much more intuitive way.
The animations were created in Blender, the popular 3D animation software. For the underlying simulations running behind the scenes, it was developed using the OpenEMS platform. (Sam) used openEMS to run electromagnetic simulations of simple circuits through KiCAD. From there, it was a matter of finding a way to export the simulation results so that they could be imported into Blender. This was achieved by having the Paraview software act as a conduit in conjunction with a custom Python script.
The result is that (Sam) can create visually pleasing electromagnetic simulations that are easy to understand. There is no need to imagine the behavior of an RF signal in a theoretical coax cable with no termination, when one simply can See what happens in (Sam’s) animation.
Simulation is a powerful tool that is often key to engineering workflows, as we saw earlier.
