Effect of Interfacial Thermal Resistance in Thermal Cloak

TL;DR

This paper investigates how interfacial thermal resistance (ITR) affects the performance of thermal cloaks, revealing that ITR can distort external fields and compromise cloaking effectiveness, with implications for multilayer thermal cloak design.

Contribution

It introduces the analysis of ITR effects on thermal cloaks, a factor previously neglected, and quantifies this effect using a new characteristic length parameter.

Findings

ITR distorts external thermal fields

ITR can destroy the effectiveness of thermal cloaks

A characteristic length parameter quantifies ITR impact

Abstract

When heat transfers through interface between two different materials, it will encounter an interfacial thermal resistance (ITR) that makes the temperature discontinuous. This effect has been totally neglected so far in the research of thermal cloak, in particular when the thermal cloak is built with multilayer structures. In this paper, we investigate the effect of ITR on the performance of the thermal cloak by using both analytical and numerical method. Our results show that the existence of ITR will distort the external field, thus destroy the cloak. Moreover, we found that the effect of ITR can be quantified by a parameter called characteristic length.