Computationally-tractable synthesis of an MXene metamaterial absorber with a 3D-printable spatially variable substrate by a local approach

Abstract

We introduce the LOCABINACONN3D methodology to enable the computationally tractable synthesis of MXene metamaterial absorbers (MMA) based on spatially variable 3D-printable substrates. Spatially variable substrates offer enhanced absorption bandwidth compared to constant ones. Such MXene MMAs are typically synthesized by inverse design, which may lead to non-manufacturable optimized dielectric substrates. To transform non-manufacturable dielectric substrates into manufacturable ones, existing methodologies either add manufacturing constraints to the optimization, which may lead to less optimized MMAs, or are computationally expensive, as they require full-wave simulations of the entire manufacturable MMA. We develop a computationally tractable methodology, LOCABINACONN3D, to render optimized MMAs manufacturable, preserving performance. Our methodology (i) accommodates detailed connectivity constraints across consecutive layers, thus facilitating multilayer fabrication, and (ii) enables scaling to larger MMAs, by requiring simulations only of smaller manufacturable MMA subareas and by using a semi-analytical method-of-lines (MoL) solver instead of full-wave methods to determine suitable manufacturable configurations. This work paves the way for synthesizing optimized larger-scale 3D-printable MMAs more efficiently.