Reliability-based design optimization scheme for designing electromagnetic shielding structures

This article, presents a reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) study for designing electromagnetic shielding structures. The existing deterministic design approaches do not integrate the uncertainty involved in the design variables or problem parameters of such shielding structures thereby, the ignorance of uncertainty provides variation in the expected shielding effectiveness (SE) in the optimized design solution. The application of RBDO allows determining the best design solution, while explicitly considering the inevitable effects of uncertainty in the design variables and problem parameters. The proposed approach employs a nested optimization approach for solving the RBDO formulation for the shielding structure under uncertainty. The real-coded genetic algorithm is being used to handle deterministic constraints (outer loop) whereas hybrid mean-value method is employed to evaluate probabilistic constraints in the RBDO formulation (inner loops). The approach is illustrated with an example considering three-layered shielding structures’ design for the SE requirement of ~80 dB in 8–12.5 GHz frequency range.