THE APPLICATION OF TRANSFORMATION OPTICS IN THERMAL METAMATERIALS DESIGN

Abstract

Metamaterials are engineered composite media that exhibit unique
electromagnetic properties. Much of the effort in scientific communities is devoted
to designing some novel devices such as invisibility cloak, super lens,… which are
potentially applied in a wide range of applications. Transformation optics (TO) is a
powerful method for the conceptual design of these complex media, offering the
abilities of controlling electromagnetic waves at will. In this paper, we introduce
the concept of transformation optics and develop this method for thermal
metamaterials, a new class of metamaterials which has amazing properties in heat
transfer beyond the natural thermal devices. Then, we show the way of designing
thermal cloak and thermal concentrator structures based on transformation optics
and verify the effect of these artificial structures using finite-element method by
commercial software COMSOL Multiphysics.