Experimental demonstration of thermal metastructures designed by topology optimization

Abstract

Thermal metastructures designed by topology optimization are demonstrated in experiments for invisibility cloaking and invisible heat flux focusing. Our demonstrations exhibit the capabilities of two topology-optimized metastructures, specifically, a thermal invisibility cloak that makes an obstacle thermally invisible and a thermal cloak-concentrator that focuses heat flux without disturbing the outer temperature, as well as their performances. These metastructures are composed simply of steel and copper and their spatial arrangements are optimized through topology optimization without any meta-materials. Moreover, both metastructures were easy to fabricate. Their promising performances in the steady states are verified in not only numerical simulations but also experiments.