Abstract
A thermal manipulator for use in high temperature environments was designed and constructed based on the coordinate transformation method of transformation thermodynamics. The thermal manipulator has two key functions: (1) Guides the heat flux from one region (the center heat source) and (2) Concentrates the guided heat flux to multiple distributed regions outside. The thermal manipulator uses multiple fan-shaped thermal concentrators around the heat source. The fan-shaped concentrators with highly anisotropic thermal conductivities were made of two isotropic materials, copper and a synthesized silica-alumina fibrous matrix, with a working temperature upper limit of 1000°C. Simulations and experiments show that the copper-based metamaterial thermal manipulators can efficiently guide the heat flux from the central heat source and concentrate the heat flux at multiple distributed regions in a high-temperature environment. The thermal manipulator heat flux concentration efficiency was 55.4% with a region concentration ratio of 2.50 which indicates a very strong heat concentration capability which is more than twice that of traditional isotropic materials. Thus, this research provides an effective thermal manipulating method for high-temperature conditions.
Highlights
Heat flux manipulation has attracted a great deal of research due to its significance in various scientific and industrial fields, such as solar cells,[1,2,5] fuel cells,[3] thermal insulation[4] and thermoelectricity.[6]
Thermal manipulators using thermal metamaterials based on transformation thermodynamics can improve the heat transport efficiency
This paper presents a theoretical design of a high-temperature thermal manipulator using transformation thermodynamics with the design verified in numerical stimulations and experiments
Summary
Heat flux manipulation has attracted a great deal of research due to its significance in various scientific and industrial fields, such as solar cells,[1,2,5] fuel cells,[3] thermal insulation[4] and thermoelectricity.[6]. Thermocrystals have been developed to control heat fluxes. In analogy to photonic and phononic crystals’ guiding light and sound, thermocrystals can guide the heat flux by controlling the heatcarrying phonons. Thermocrystals have been used in thermal waveguides, thermal lattices, thermal imaging, thermo-optics, thermal diodes and thermal cloaking.[8,9]. Another approach for effective heat flux manipulation is to design thermal metamaterials. Thermal metamaterials are carefully designed structures composed of different kinds of naturally occurring materials and show heat conduction properties different from naturally occurring materials. Cloaking,[13,14,15,16,22,23,24,29,30,33] flux
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