Design of switchable transient thermal concentrators with diamond shapes

¹ Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Fudan University - Shanghai 200433, China

^(a) niyushan@fudan.edu.cn (corresponding author)

Received: 29 May 2021
Accepted: 21 October 2021

Abstract

Thermal concentrators designed by the transformation thermotics have recently received considerable attention on the aspect of improving thermal energy efficiency in the process of energy consumption. However, the existing researches of thermal concentrators with diamond shapes are limited to steady state and non-switchable state, which hinders the analysis of the changeable thermal concentrating effect with time and restricts practical applications under different temperature conditions. In order to overcome these limitations, the intelligent switchable transient thermal concentrators with diamond shapes are designed in this paper, which can realize the switchable concentrating effect as the temperature changes. The numerical simulation method is employed to demonstrate the temperature-dependent properties of switchable concentrators. The results show that the concentrator can achieve perfect performance of thermal concentrating at low (or high) temperature, and the concentrating effect is automatically turned off at high (or low) temperature. The switchable concentrating effect can greatly widen the application fields of thermal concentrators and provide an effective method for heat management, compared with the previous steady-state and non-switchable–state concentrators with diamond shapes.