Thermal metamaterial for convergent transfer of conductive heat with high efficiency

It is crucially important to focusconductive heat in an efficient way, which has received much attention in energy science (say, solar cells), but is still far from being satisfactory due to the diffusive (divergent) nature of the heat. By developing atheory with hybrid transformations (rotation and stretch-compression), here we providetheoretical and experimental evidences for a type of thermalmetamaterial called thermal converger. The converger is capable of convergentlyconducting heat in contrast to the known divergent behavior of heatdiffusion, thus yielding a large heating region with high temperatures close to the heat source (high efficiency). The thermal converger further allows us to design a thermal grating —a thermal counterpart of opticalgrating. This work has relevance to heat focus with high efficiency, and it offers guidance both for efficient heat transfer and for designing thermal-converger-likemetamaterials in other fields, such as electrics/magnetics, electromagnetics/optics, acoustics, and particlediffusion.

Source: Applied Physics Letters - November 17, 2016 Category: Physics Authors: Xiangying Shen, Chaoran Jiang, Ying Li and Jiping Huang Source Type: research