Full Wave Surrogate Modeling for Practical Metasurface Synthesis

THE CHALLENGE


The main challenge in developing advanced metasurfaces lies in bridging the gap between complex electromagnetic design and practical, scalable manufacturing. Current methods often rely on homogenization, which simplifies the behavior of intricate subwavelength structures into average material properties. While this makes early design steps manageable, it introduces inaccuracies that lead to performance loss when moving from computer models to physical devices. On the other hand, running full electromagnetic simulations for large, real-world metasurfaces is so computationally expensive that it becomes impractical for iterative design or optimization. This creates a significant barrier for industries such as telecommunications, aerospace, and defense, where companies need reliable, high performance metasurfaces that can be designed quickly, verified accurately, and produced at scale without excessive cost or delays.

 

OUR SOLUTION


We introduce a homogenization free design framework for metasurfaces that combines the accuracy of full wave physics with the efficiency of surrogate modeling. Instead of relying on oversimplified averages that often fail in real applications, this approach learns the detailed electromagnetic behavior of unit cells through advanced simulations and encodes it into a parameterized matrix model. The result is a powerful tool that allows companies to directly design and optimize large, complex, and even curved metasurfaces with full physical accuracy while cutting down the heavy computational cost that usually slows innovation. By eliminating translation errors between theory and manufacturing, this technology ensures that what is designed on the computer can be built and deployed in practice, offering industries such as telecommunications, aerospace, and defense a faster, more reliable path to market for next generation wave control devices.


Figure: Conformal metasurfaces for aircraft and military vehicles communications.

Advantages:

  • Eliminates homogenization errors by directly modeling physical unit cell responses
  • Achieves massive computational speedup with surrogate models
  • Accurately captures mutual coupling and spatial dispersion effects
  • Scales efficiently to large, aperiodic, and conformal metasurface designs

Potential Application:

  • 5G/6G reconfigurable intelligent surfaces
  • Conformal antennas for aerospace and vehicles
  • Radar cloaking and stealth devices
  • Planar lenses and polarization converters

Patent Information: