A Brief Review on Thermal Metamaterials for Cloaking and Heat Flux Manipulation

Abstract

Progress in material science has allowed the control of different physical fields in a manner that would be unachievable with ordinary materials. The development of engineered materials (the so‐called metamaterials) to control the conductive heat flux has revolutionized the manner of manipulating thermal energy and allowed the possibility of guiding the heat flux in ways difficult to accept for human intuition. Herein, a brief review regarding the recent progress and developments in thermal metamaterials conceived to perform several conductive heat flux manipulation tasks is provided. Deeply theoretical discussions concerning design methodologies are left a side, and the focus is made on the design and manufacturing feasibility of metamaterials for thermal cloaking and camouflage, heat flux concentration, and inversion, among other applications that lead to the next generation of thermal devices.

Design of Thermal Metamaterials with Excellent Thermal Control Functions by Using Functional Nanoporous Graphene

“…Until 2012, Narayana and Sato [ 16 ] successfully fabricated a thermal invisible cloak by constructing a concentric layered structure consisting of alternating layers of two different homogeneous isotropic thermal conductivities. Since then, a variety of thermal metamaterials, including thermal cloak and thermal concentrator, have been proposed, and some of them have been experimentally realized, [ 17–25 ] paving the way for follow‐up research. It is worth noting that these novel thermal phenomena in above‐mentioned metamaterials are mostly based on macroscopic compound structures such as metal/polymer.…”

Active Thermal Cloaking and Mimicking

“…Controlling the heat flux may find applications in enhancing the efficiency of thermal devices in solar thermal collectors, protecting electronic circuits from heating, or the design of thermal analogs of electronic transistors, rectifiers, and diodes [4]. Moreover, all our results could be easily adapted to control of mass diffusion with potential applications ranging from biology with the delay of the drug release for therapeutic applications [5,6] to civil engineering with the control of corrosion of steel in reinforced concrete structures [7].…”

Active thermal cloaking and mimicking

“…Controlling the heat flux may find applications in enhancing the efficiency of thermal devices in solar thermal collectors, protecting electronic circuits from heating, or the design of thermal analogues of electronic transistors, rectifiers and diodes [28]. Moreover, all our results could be easily adapted to control of mass diffusion with potential applications ranging from biology with the delay of the drug release for therapeutic applications [29,30] to civil engineering with the control of corrosion of steel in reinforced concrete structures [31].…”