Development and Application of Genetic Programming for Advanced Metamaterial Designs

This chapter encompasses the journey over the past several years of the group’s efforts to design metamaterials for advanced electromagnetic applications utilizing genetic programming (GP). Starting with the initial work in designing, validating, and characterizing metamaterials for use in ultra-wideband ground plane applications based on human expertise, the need for an optimized design methodology is identified. Next, the rationale to investigate the use of GP for metamaterial design because of its potential to lead to novel and ill-logical structures is explained. Then, the development of the GP software and its resulting metamaterial designs are presented detailing the evolution of the developed GP software over time as different applications were explored. Finally, the results of the experimental validation of the GP-generated designs along with a procedure to characterize their novel, non-intuitive design structures through the use of Prony’s method and equivalent circuit models are presented.