Bilayer thermal metadevices that mold transient heat flows

Abstract

Thermal manipulation has been widely researched due to its potential in novel functions, such as cloaking, illusion and sensing. To avoid the spatially inhomogeneous and anisotropic heat conductivity tensors (introduced by transformation thermodynamics), several thermal cloaks based on scattering cancellation (SC) approach are designed and experimentally demonstrated. However, the current SC cloak is only effective in the steady-state heat transfer condition as the heat capacity terms are neglected by the requirement of constant external fields. In order to expand the SC cloak to the transient regime, a bilayer scheme is introduced to achieve the accurate solutions of the camouflage equations considering time factors. Indeed, there are two equations to solve with two unknown quantities: first the thermal conductivity and second the product of specific heat capacity by the density. We construct thermal camouflage devices and verify their ability to mold dynamic heat flows both by simulations and experiments. Our proposed method paves an efficient avenue to extend SC approach to dynamic heat transfer regime.