Genetic Optimization With Mixed-Order Prism Macroelements for 3-D Metamaterial Multilayered Structures

The optimal performance of 3-D planar metamaterial wideband devices is attained by maximizing their frequency bandgap. This, in turn, requires a design optimization procedure and iterative calculations of dispersion diagram points. To this aim, an efficient technique, blending a new mixed-order prism macroelement with an adjustable genetic algorithm (GA), is introduced in this paper for the rapid computation of dispersion diagrams. The developed scheme can launch diverse alternation orders along possible directions, whereas it is significantly more enhanced than existing approximations. In this way, the reduced degrees of freedom (DoF) facilitate the treatment of the derived eigenvalue problem and lead to a rigorous tool for the dispersion diagram of electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) structures, whose performance is intuitively optimized via the GA. For its validation, the featured method is thoroughly applied to diverse metamaterial multilayered setups with demanding geometric details and hard-to-model regions.