Isogeometric Shape Optimization for Electromagnetic Scattering Problems

We consider the benchmark problem of magnetic energy density enhancement in a small spatial region by varying the shape of two symmetric conducting scatterers. We view this problem as a prototype for a wide variety of geometric design problems in electromagnetic applications. Our approach for solving this problem is based on shape optimization and isogeometric analysis. One of the major difficulties we face to make these methods work together is the need to maintain a valid parametrization of the computational domain during the optimization. Our approach to generating a domain parametrization is based on minimizing a second order approximation to the Winslow functional in the vicinity of a reference parametrization. Furthermore, we enforce the validity of the parametrization by ensuring the non-negativity of the coefficients of a B-spline expansion of the Jacobian. The shape found by this approach outperforms earlier design computed using topology optimization by a factor of one billion.