An effective method for designing new structural left-handed material based on topology optimisation

¹ School of Civil Engineering, Shenyang Jianzhu University, 110168, Shenyang, P.R. China
² Key Laboratory of Liaoning Province for Composite Structural Analysis of Aerocraft and Simulation, Shenyang Aerospace University, 110136, Shenyang, P.R. China

Corresponding authors: starwei2002@163.com weikaixu@gmail.com

Received: 30 March 2010
Revised: 18 October 2010
Accepted: 18 November 2010
Published online: 28 January 2011

Abstract

A systematic method for the design of potential microstructure configurations of structural left-handed materials (LHMs) based on topology optimisation technique is presented, and a single objective and a multi-objective optimisation model are proposed. The material considered is a periodic array of dielectric substrates attached with metal film pieces, and the microstructure design of left-handed material is formulated through determining the arrangements of those metal pieces. Different from the conventional configurations of LHMs which consist of magnetic resonators and wires, our results showed that novel integrative configurations without wires can be obtained as microstructures of LHMs. Topology optimisation technique is a universal and effective tool for configuration design of LHMs, and many new structural LHMs with the desired electromagnetic characteristics can be obtained by this systematic approach.