Thermal-null medium (TNM): a novel material to achieve feasible thermodynamics devices beyond conventional challenges

TL;DR

This paper introduces the thermal-null medium (TNM), a homogeneous, shape-independent material enabling versatile thermal devices like cloaks and concentrators, simplifying design and reconfigurability in heat manipulation applications.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel homogeneous thermal-null medium (TNM) that simplifies the design of thermal devices and is independent of shape, unlike traditional inhomogeneous, anisotropic materials.

Findings

TNM enables thermal bending, concentration, and cloaking.

Numerical simulations confirm TNM's effectiveness.

TNM's shape-independence enhances reconfigurability.

Abstract

Recently, heat manipulation has gained the attention of scientific community due to its several applications. In this letter, based on transformation thermodynamic (TT) methodology, a novel material, which is called thermal-null medium (TNM), is proposed that enables us to design various thermal functionalities such as thermal bending devices, arbitrary shape heat concentrators and omnidirectional thermal cloaks. In contrary to the conventional TT-based conductivities, which are inhomogeneous and anisotropic, TNMs are homogeneous and easy to realize. In addition, the attained TNMs are independent of the device shape. That is if the geometry of the desired device is changed, there is no need to recalculate the necessitating conductivities. This feature of TNM will make it suitable for scenarios where re-configurability is of utmost importance. Several numerical simulations are carried out to demonstrate the TNM capability and its applications in directional bending devices, heat concentrators and thermal cloaks. The proposed TNM could open a new avenue for potential applications in solar thermal panels and thermal-electric devices.