Design of ultra-thin underwater acoustic metasurface for broadband low-frequency diffuse reflection by deep neural networks

Underwater acoustic metasurfaces have broad application prospects for the stealth of underwater objects. However, problems such as a narrow operating frequency band, poor operating performance, and considerable thickness at low frequencies remain. In this study a reverse design method for ultra-thin underwater acoustic metasurfaces for low-frequency broadband is proposed using a tandem fully connected deep neural network. The tandem neural network consists of a pre-trained forward neural network and a reverse neural network, based on which a set of elements with flat phase variation and an almost equal phase shift interval in the range of 700–1150 Hz is designed. A diffuse underwater acoustic metasurface with 60 elements was designed, showing that the energy loss of the metasurface in the echo direction was greater than 10 dB. Our work opens a novel pathway for realising low-frequency wideband underwater acoustic devices, which will enable various applications in the future.