Active Thermal Cloaking and Mimicking

TL;DR

This paper introduces an active thermal cloaking technique that uses boundary heat sources to hide objects or sources and can also mimic different objects, based on boundary measurements in homogeneous media.

Contribution

It develops a novel active cloaking and mimicking method for heat diffusion that is adaptable and independent of the cloaked object, relying on boundary source design.

Findings

Effective cloaking of objects and sources demonstrated.

Ability to mimic different objects or sources.

Method applicable in homogeneous isotropic media.

Abstract

We present an active cloaking method for the parabolic heat (and mass or light diffusion) equation that can hide both objects and sources. By active we mean that it relies on designing monopole and dipole heat source distributions on the boundary of the region to be cloaked. The same technique can be used to make a source or an object look like a different one to an observer outside the cloaked region, from the perspective of thermal measurements. Our results assume a homogeneous isotropic bulk medium and require knowledge of the source to cloak or mimic, but are in most cases independent of the object to cloak.