Patch

A Patch in AN-SOF represents a solid rectangular conductive surface lying on the xy-plane or a plane parallel to it (z = constant). This structure consists of wires with a flat or rectangular cross-section that cover the entire surface of the patch.

You can use this command to model patch antennas, where the patch is a solid rectangular metal sheet. To do this, you must choose the Substrate option as the ground plane by navigating to the Setup tab > Environment panel > Ground Plane box.

If you need to model a solid rectangular surface or a rectangular wire grid in free space or above a real ground plane, use the Plate command instead of Patch.

To access the Patch command, go to Draw > Wire Grid / Solid Surface > Patch in the main menu. The displayed dialog box consists of three pages: Patch, Attributes, and Materials, detailed in Fig. 1.

The Patch page

On the Patch page, you can configure the geometric parameters for the Patch. To define the Patch, specify the coordinates of two opposite corner points in a plane z = constant, as illustrated in Fig. 2.

Once you’ve configured the geometric parameters on the Patch page, you can proceed to the Attributes page, where you can specify the number of facets for the Patch. See Grid/Surface Attributes for additional parameters in the Attributes page and Wire Materials for parameters in the Materials page.