A Surrogate Model for the Forward Design of Multi-layered Metasurface-based Radar Absorbing Structures
This work addresses the time-consuming simulation bottleneck for engineers designing stealth and electromagnetic shielding technologies, representing an incremental improvement in optimization efficiency.
The paper tackled the computationally intensive design of multi-layered metasurface-based radar absorbing structures by proposing a surrogate model using a convolutional neural network with Huber loss, achieving a cosine similarity of 99.9% and mean square error of 0.001 while significantly reducing computational time.
Metasurface-based radar absorbing structures (RAS) are highly preferred for applications like stealth technology, electromagnetic (EM) shielding, etc. due to their capability to achieve frequency selective absorption characteristics with minimal thickness and reduced weight penalty. However, the conventional approach for the EM design and optimization of these structures relies on forward simulations, using full wave simulation tools, to predict the electromagnetic (EM) response of candidate meta atoms. This process is computationally intensive, extremely time consuming and requires exploration of large design spaces. To overcome this challenge, we propose a surrogate model that significantly accelerates the prediction of EM responses of multi-layered metasurface-based RAS. A convolutional neural network (CNN) based architecture with Huber loss function has been employed to estimate the reflection characteristics of the RAS model. The proposed model achieved a cosine similarity of 99.9% and a mean square error of 0.001 within 1000 epochs of training. The efficiency of the model has been established via full wave simulations as well as experiment where it demonstrated significant reduction in computational time while maintaining high predictive accuracy.