Maximizing Shielding Effectiveness of Thin Time-Varying Dielectric Layer

This paper investigates the optimization of time-domain shielding effectiveness for a thin, time-varying dielectric layer excited by pulsed electromagnetic waves. By varying the layer’s capacitance harmonically over time, the study demonstrates significant enhancements in key shielding effectiveness metrics, including the peak and time-derivative reduction shielding effectiveness. Both local and global optimization algorithms are employed to solve the single-objective optimization problem. Results highlight the limitations of gradient-based local optimization methods and showcase the efficacy of global approaches for such a complex time-domain optimization problem. Particularly, algorithms based on differential evolution strategies, namely DE and SHADE, delivered very promising results in terms of accuracy and consistency compared to other algorithms.