Deep learning based hybrid sequence modeling for optical response retrieval in metasurfaces for STPV applications

A standardized hybrid deep-learning model based on a combination of a deep convolutional network and a recurrent neural network is proposed to predict the optical response of metasurfaces considering their shape and all the important dimensional parameters (such as periodicity, height, width, and aspect ratio) simultaneously. It is further used to aid the design procedure of the key components of solar thermophotovoltaics (STPVs), i.e., metasurface based perfect solar absorbers and selective emitters. Although these planar meta-absorbers and meta-emitters offer an ideal platform to realize compact and efficient STPV systems, a conventional procedure to design these is time taking, laborious, and computationally exhaustive. The optimization of such planar devices needs hundreds of EM simulations, where each simulation requires multiple iterations to solve Maxwell’s equations on a case-by-case basis. To overcome these challenges, we propose a unique deep learning-based model that generates the most likely optical response by taking images of the unit cells as input. The proposed model uses a deep residual convolutional network to extract the features from the images followed by a gated recurrent unit to infer the desired optical response. Two datasets having considerable variance are collected to train the proposed network by simulating randomly shaped nanostructures in CST microwave studio with periodic boundary conditions over the desired wavelength ranges. These simulations yield the optical absorption/emission response as the target labels. The proposed hybrid configuration and transfer learning provide a generalized model to infer the absorption/emission spectrum of solar absorbers/emitters within a fraction of seconds with high accuracy, regardless of its shape and dimensions. This accuracy is defined by the regression metric mean square error (MSE), where the minimum MSE achieved for absorbers and emitters test datasets are 7.3 × 10−04 and 6.2 × 10−04 respectively. The trained model can also be fine-tuned to predict the absorption response of different thin film refractory materials. To enhance the diversity of the model. Thus it aids metasurface design procedure by replacing the conventional time-consuming and computationally exhaustive numerical simulations and electromagnetic (EM) software. The comparison of the average simulation time (for 10 samples) and the average DL model prediction time shows that the DL model works about 98% faster than the conventional simulations. We believe that the proposed methodology will open new research directions towards more challenging optimization problems in the field of electromagnetic metasurfaces.