Manipulating Steady Heat Conduction by Sensu-shaped Thermal Metamaterials

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple, identical sensu-shaped unit for creating thermal metamaterials that can control heat flow in versatile ways, including concentration, focusing, and uniform heating, with potential applications in various thermal management fields.

Contribution

The work demonstrates that using identical sensu-shaped units arranged properly can achieve advanced thermal control functions without complex multilayered structures.

Findings

Successfully realized thermal concentrator and focusing using identical units.

Demonstrated manipulation of heat flow and dc currents with simple arrangements.

Applicable to thermal sensing, imaging, and energy storage.

Abstract

The ability to design the control of heat flow has innumerable benefits in the design of electronic systems such as thermoelectric energy harvesters, solid-state lighting, and thermal imagers, where the thermal design plays a key role in performance and device reliability. However, to realize one advanced control function of thermal flux, one needs to design one sophisticated, multilayered and inhomogeneous thermal structure with different composition/shape at different regions of one device. In this work, we employ one identical sensu-unit with facile natural composition to experimentally realize a new class of thermal metamaterials for controlling thermal conduction (e.g., thermal concentrator, focusing/resolving, uniform heating), only resorting to positioning and locating the same unit element of sensu-shape structure. The thermal metamaterial unit and the proper arrangement of multiple identical units are capable of transferring, redistributing and managing thermal energy in a versatile fashion. It is also shown that our sensu-shape unit elements can be used in manipulating dc currents without any change in the layout for the thermal counterpart. The proposed scheme can also be applied to control dc electric currents and dc magnetic fields that governed by Laplace equation. These could markedly enhance the capabilities in thermal sensing, thermal imaging, thermal-energy storage, thermal packaging, thermal therapy, and more domains beyond.