Introduction

This TCSTInterface class allows for communication with CST Microwave Studio from within MATLAB using Windows' COM technology.

The main goal of this submission is to control an existing CST project, get and post-process the simulation results, export geometry and get various information from the project. If there is a need to build the geometry programmatically, there is another good submission in Matlab File Exchange which suits better for that.

Features

This CST-MATLAB interface features the following:

Model control:

• Open/close CST project, connect to the active one;
• Store/change/read/enumerate parameters of the model with or without the model rebuild, getting parameters' expressions.
• Copy all model parameters and their values to MATLAB workspace.
• Enumerate/add/delete field monitors.
• Find Run ID for the given parameter combination.

Solving:

• Run selected solver;
• Preparing the CST project for evaluating the cost function in MATLAB while optimizing. It can also be used for running a custom MATLAB function as the CST simulation post-processing step ("Template Based Post-Processing").

Retrieving results:

• Enumerate tree items in the Navigation Tree.
• Read 1D results from any tree item with several available filters.
• 1D results can be queried for a specific X-coordinate (often frequency), optionally with interpolation.
• Read S- or Z-parameters in a convenient matrix form for multi-port structures.
• Get model parameters corresponding to each Run ID in the Result Navigator.
• All queries for results can have a Run ID filter.
• Read radiation field for both single-frequency and broadband field monitors.
• Reading results for parametric sweeps done in CST. As an option, each such result can be organized in a matrix, each dimension of which corresponds to one of the swept parameters.

Exporting:

• Export S-parameters to TOUCHSTONE file by means of CST;
• Export current model view to an image. User can rotate the model view before exporting.
• Export the model geometry to an STL file (triangulated objects) with surface approximation control.

View control (useful for image exporting):

• Rotate 3D view to predefined position or custom view direction (like in MATLAB "view" function).
• Toggle wire-frame view.
• Toggle gradient background.

Getting various information:

• About materials used in the project: name, color, transparency.
• About geometrical objects (solids): name, component, material, color and transparency (exactly how it looks in CST), volume, mass.
• CST license info.
• Project units for different quantities and coefficient to convert them to SI units.

In addition, a customized STL-file reader is included in order to plot geometry like they are seen in CST MWS.

One of the class methods (ReadParametricResults) use two custom classes (TResultsStorage and TMyTable). I apologize for not providing source code for them, but they are not yet in the state to go public :)

If other functionality is desired, please post a feature request here.

Demos / Documentation

All functionalities are well documented in the included Live Script demos. MATLAB R2018a or higher is desired in order to not loose code samples in the demos.

Bugs found?

If you encounter any errors or notice some misfunction while using the interface, please open an issue directly in GitHub.

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Jan Simon for his great function GetFullPath, it is very helpful for this interface.