abstract = "Metamaterials are materials with engineered
characteristics and unique properties not naturally
available, such as artificial magnetic conductors
(AMC). Limitation of present AMC designs is related to
their narrowband and high frequency operation, in GHz
range. For many commercial and military applications,
however, it is desired to design such materials in
lower MHz band and with ultra-wideband (UWB)
performance. In addition, typical 2D AMCs are designed
by trial and error, often based on combination of
layers of existing designs, and lossy materials are
used to achieve broadband performance. There is no
methodology that exists for designing true-3D
metamaterials with broadband characteristics in the MHz
band. This research uses genetic programming (GP) to
automatically and efficiently explore the use of 3D
design space to develop materials with the desired low
frequency and broadband characteristics. Genetic
programing is a genetically based evolutionary process
that creates and modifies new geometries to achieve
final designs that meet desired specifications. In this
dissertation, GP software is developed and used to
synthesize 3D, compact, UWB AMC ground planes, with a
focus on achieving a lower frequency response and
without using lossy or expensive magnetic materials.
Full-wave electromagnetic simulation software (HFSS) is
used to evaluate these designs. To accelerate the
design process, GP is hybridized with a low-level
optimizer, where GP creates and modifies topologies at
the upper level while at the lower level each design is
optimized separate from GP. The code is further
parallelized to speed up the computations. Simulation
results for nine AMC ground plane examples meeting the
specifications (225-450 MHz, compact) with thicknesses
ranging from lambda0/11 to lambda_0/16 are presented to
illustrate variety of successful topologies achieved by
GP software while requiring only a set of design
specifications. This research thus provides an
efficient design methodology for electromagnetic
devices and systems, when augmented with suitable
design algorithms, it could be used to design 3D
metamaterials in general, antennas, and antenna array
systems. Results from this research specifically fill a
significant need of designing lower frequency UWB AMC
ground planes without the use of heavy and/or expensive
magnetic materials typically used in the MHz range.",