Fast active thermal cloaking through PDE-constrained optimization and reduced-order modeling

TL;DR

This paper presents a computationally efficient method for active thermal cloaking using PDE-constrained optimization combined with reduced-order modeling, enabling rapid control of heat sources to hide objects thermally.

Contribution

It introduces a PDE-constrained optimization framework with reduced basis methods for fast, adaptable thermal cloaking across multiple scenarios with varying material and source parameters.

Findings

Achieves significant computational speedup over full-order models.

Successfully handles complex shapes and disconnected control domains.

Demonstrates effective thermal cloaking in virtual scenarios.

Abstract

In this paper we show how to efficiently achieve thermal cloaking from a computational standpoint in several virtual scenarios by controlling a distribution of active heat sources. We frame this problem in the setting of PDE-constrained optimization, where the reference field is the solution of the time-dependent heat equation in the absence of the object to cloak. The optimal control problem then aims at actuating the space-time control field so that the thermal field outside the obstacle is indistinguishable from the reference field. In particular, we consider multiple scenarios where material's thermal diffusivity, source intensity and obstacle's temperature are allowed to vary within a user-defined range. To tackle the thermal cloaking problem in a rapid and reliable way, we rely on a parametrized reduced order model built through the reduced basis method, thus entailing huge computational speedups compared to high-fidelity, full-order model exploiting the finite element method while dealing both with complex target shapes and disconnected control domains.