Thermal metamaterials represent an innovative class of materials characterized by unique thermal properties rarely found in nature, owing to their novel structures. These materials offer the capability to manipulate heat flow, presenting applications that contribute to enhancing the efficiency of thermal appliances, advancing heat transfer, facilitating heat energy harvesting, constructing thermal circuits, and exploring novel applications like detection-antidetection and thermal computing.
Traditional approaches to thermal metamaterial design rely on analytical methods, such as transformational thermotics and scattering cancellation methods, that struggle with accommodating complex geometries, diverse boundary conditions, and various design constraints or regularizations. In response to these limitations, we advocate for the adoption of a more flexible and versatile numerical tool based on structural optimization for the design of thermal metamaterials.
Structural optimization not only surmounts the limitations inherent in conventional design methods but also introduces flexibility and robustness often absent in analytical approaches. Unlike transformation thermotics, it does not require a pre-established form-invariance of governing equations or intuition-based coordinate transformations, providing a more adaptable and efficient avenue for creating advanced thermal metamaterials.
References:
Jansari, Chintan, Stéphane PA Bordas, and Elena Atroshchenko. "Design of metamaterial-based heat manipulators by isogeometric shape optimization." International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 196 (2022): 123201.
Jansari, Chintan, Stéphane PA Bordas, and Elena Atroshchenko. "Design of metamaterial-based heat manipulators by isogeometric level-set topology optimization." Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization (2023).