Numerical Examination of Metamaterial Concentrator Design for High Efficient Thermal Energy Harvester

Abstract

Nowadays, research on energy harvesting is highly interest to harvest more waste thermal energy which produced by any kind of thermal engine in our daily life. Thermal metamaterials, designed by transformation thermodynamics are artificial structure that can actively control heat flux at a continuum scale. However, right now the problem of using metamaterial on thermal harvesting is to know what is the best shape design, configuration, and best material to obtain highly efficient on thermal energy harvesting because of the number of research on this field is limited. Flower-shaped metamaterial thermal concentrator has developed and it showed that the design can performed well on directing heat flux to specific location. However, the Flower-shaped metamaterial design that has been conducted before not optimized yet. In the current paper, the numerical simulation and analysis for several metamaterial and shape construction variations were performed using Ansys Workbench™ to characterize the best configuration to optimizing flower-shaped thermal concentrator. A number of interesting numerical computation presented on this research manuscript including total heat flux, temperature distribution, and thermal concentrator efficiency on the surface of the constructed concentrator. The aim of this paper is to provide more reference on metamaterial design for thermal harvesting.