Case Study: Duke University achieves microwave metamaterial cloaking design with Comsol

Metamaterials make Physics Seem Like Magic

Duke University’s Center for Metamaterials and Integrated Plasmonics (led by David R. Smith and Yaroslav Urzhumov) needed to design and optimize highly complex metamaterials—cloaks, negative‑index lenses, THz metafilms and devices for wireless power transfer—whose electromagnetic responses are inhomogeneous, nonlinear, and strongly affected by ohmic losses, making analytical prediction impractical and requiring exploration of large design parameter spaces.

Using Comsol Multiphysics, Duke ran coupled electromagnetic, heat‑transfer and structural simulations with sensitivity analysis, gradient‑based optimization and custom model terms (extra polarization densities) to predict and refine device behavior. Comsol enabled key results—discovering cloaks that perform well in the short‑wavelength limit, extending fluid‑cloak designs into nonlinear regimes, guiding negative‑permeability lens designs for wireless power, and engineering metafilms with near‑100% THz absorption—reducing prototyping time, improving performance predictions and enabling smaller, more efficient device designs.

Duke University

Yaroslav Urzhumov

Assistant Research Professor