Thermal cloak has several interesting thermal functionalities: (i) to create a region with zero temperature gradient, and (ii) to minimize the heat disturbance surrounding to the items within the cloaked region by turning the heat flow around it. The challenge of the transformation thermodynamics is to make the transformed material properties being highly anisotropic and heterogeneous. A metamaterial provides the possibility to practically visualize the thermal cloak analogous to the cloaking in electromagnetism.

The recent work by Imran, Zhang and Gain introduced a new thermal metamaterial design, which integrated convective element, surface fins with the conventional cloaking as a passive cooling mechanism. They demonstrated that their design can keep the cloaked region at a low temperature for a long period of time yet with zero gradient of temperature change. As such, any items within the cloaked region can be protected from the disturbance of temperature rise from the surrounding area, as shown in Figure 1. With both numerical simulations and experimental verification, the authors confirmed that their method can maintain the temperature in the cloaked region at about 35^oC when that in the sounding area is about 50^oC.

For more details, read the full paper here

Cite this article; Imran, M., Zhang, L. & Gain, A.K. Advanced thermal metamaterial design for temperature control at the cloaked region. Sci Rep 10, 11763 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-68481-6