A transient thermal cloak experimentally realized through a rescaled diffusion equation with anisotropic thermal diffusivity

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates an experimental transient thermal cloaking device using a rescaled anisotropic diffusion equation, enabling heat flux manipulation and cloaking of thermal disturbances with practical metamaterials.

Contribution

It extends transformation optics to the heat diffusion equation, achieving a practical thermal cloak with anisotropic thermal diffusivity for the first time.

Findings

Successfully hid a thermal scatterer using a thermal cloak

Demonstrated high-accuracy manipulation of heat flux

Validated the use of rescaled diffusion equations for device fabrication

Abstract

Transformation optics originating from the invariance of Maxwell's equations under the coordinate mapping has enabled the design and demonstration of many fascinating electromagnetic devices that were unconceivable or deemed impossible before [1-11], and has greatly contributed to the advancement of modern electromagnetism and related researches assisted with the development of metamaterials [12-15]. This technique has been extended to apply to other partial differential equations governing different waves [16-23] or flux [24-28], and has produced various novel functional devices such as acoustic cloaks [20-23] and Schrodinger's 'hat' [19]. In the present work we applied the coordinate transformation to the time-dependent heat diffusion equation [24-28] and achieved the manipulation of the heat flux by predefined diffusion paths. In the experiment we demonstrated a transient thermal cloaking device engineered with thermal metamaterials and successfully hid a centimeter sized strong 'scatter' (thermal disturber), i.e., a vacuum cavity. To facilitate reliable fabrication we adopted the rescaled thermal diffusion equation for various ingredient materials with nearly constant product of the density and heat capacity, and took the anisotropic thermal diffusivities as the key parameters for the design. Our results unambiguously show the practical possibility to implement the complex transformed thermal media with high accuracy and acquire some unprecedented thermodynamic functions, which we believe will help to broaden the current research and pave a new way to manipulate heat for novel device applications.