Experimental demonstration of thermal cloaking metastructures designed by topology optimization

Abstract

Recent developments in information science have contributed to several innovative advances in thermal flow manipulation. Topology optimizations provide numerically optimal structures enabling superior performance from this manipulation. For cloaking and concentrating heat flux, we describe the experimental implementation of thermal metastructures designed by topology optimization. These metastructures are composed of steel, copper, and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), with their spatial compositions optimized through topology optimization without requiring metamaterials. Their performances in experiments were compared with those obtained in numerical simulations employing two different qualitative evaluations, one adopting objective functions based on temperature distribution measurements, the other comparing temperature distribution data around the thermal metastructures. The thermal metastructures designed by topology optimization performed as well in the experiments conducted as in the simulations. The differences in performance between numerical simulations and experiments and their causes are discussed.