Inverse Design of Realizable Metasurface based Absorbers using Improved Conditioning and Diversity Enhanced Progressively Growing GANs

Metasurfaces enable precise manipulation of electromagnetic waves for applications such as beam steering, sensing, and stealth technology. However, inverse design of metasurfaces with targeted EM responses remains challenging due to the computational expense of iterative full wave simulation driven optimization and the limited conditioning fidelity and diversity of existing generative approaches. To address these challenges, this paper presents a generative inverse design framework for controllable and physically consistent metasurface synthesis under continuous spectral constraints. The proposed approach employs a progressively growing Wasserstein generative adversarial network with gradient penalty integrated with feature wise linear modulation based conditioning for stable propagation of continuous spectral and fabrication constraints. EM consistency is embedded directly into the generative learning process through a surrogate assisted spectral alignment loss, enabling physics constrained generation during training. Further, a determinantal point process based diversity regularization strategy is incorporated to generate geometrically diverse yet spectrally consistent realizations for the same target response. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated through the generation of practically realizable metasurface absorbers exhibiting diverse reflection characteristics in the frequency range of 2 to 18 GHz. EM simulations validate that the generated designs meet the target specifications with high accuracy. The final proposed framework achieved an average mean squared error of 0.0052, diversity score of 0.8730, band alignment accuracy of 0.8533, and a valid EM design generation percentage of 89.57, clearly demonstrating its capability to generate highly accurate, diverse, electromagnetically consistent and fabrication realizable metasurface configurations.

Inverse Design of Metasurface based Absorbers using Physics Guided Conditional Diffusion Models

Inverse design of metasurfaces for specific electromagnetic responses requires generating geometries that satisfy stringent spectral constraints while maintaining manufacturability. Conventional design methodologies rely on iterative optimization routines using full wave simulations, which become extremely time consuming and computationally intensive for large design spaces. In addition, commonly employed generative approaches often exhibit limited conditional fidelity and the generated designs often contain fine or irregular features that are impractical to fabricate. In this regard, we propose a physics guided condition quality enhanced diffusion framework for the inverse design of metasurface based absorbers. Here, the conditioning information consisting of target reflection characteristics is integrated into the model using feature wise linear modulation (FiLM). Furthermore, to enforce adherence to target spectra, a pre trained surrogate EM simulator is embedded into the framework introducing physics aware regularization through spectrum level loss functions. The efficiency of the proposed model is demonstrated by generating practically realizable metasurfaces for different types of reflection characteristics in the frequency range of 2 to 18 GHz. The proposed framework achieves an average spectral mean squared error of 0.0006 and band alignment accuracy of 0.958 between the target spectra and the spectra produced by the generated designs, demonstrating high conditional accuracy. In addition, the model generates multiple geometries for the same condition, thereby providing diverse design alternatives to the engineer. The proposed model produces the suitable design in approximately 30 seconds, whereas the conventional approach can take several months under comparable computational resources. The efficiency of the model is also established via experimental measurements.

A Surrogate Model for the Forward Design of Multi-layered Metasurface-based Radar Absorbing Structures

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.