Self-adaptive field manipulation with thermal logic material

Abstract

Emerging thermal metamaterials have been deployed to realize advanced thermal field manipulations and opened up the possibilities of flexible control of thermal processes. However, the state-of-art thermal metamaterials only possess fixed and passive functionalities, and the artificial interventions of structural adjustments are also inescapable. In this paper, we propose a class of thermal logic material to overcome such long-standing problems. The proof-of-concept scheme can be created with varied configurations of shape memory alloy (SMA) and conventional thermal media. Thanks to the shape changes of SMA and multifarious medium configurations, self-adaptive switching between thermal transparency and obvious signature can be observed under appropriate working-temperature ranges of SMA with the logic operations of AND, NOR, and XOR-NOT gates. The findings provide a constructive paradigm of creating logic operations in thermal field, and might further pave the way of intelligent thermal manipulation and management with varied configurations of thermal logic gates.