Tunable open Janus functional thermal device based on moving thermal conductive medium

Abstract

The Janus functional thermal device (JFTD) can produce different thermal modulation effects on the heat flow incident from different directions. To solve the problems of material anisotropy and non-interaction with the external environment in the thermal target region of the previous JFTD, an open JFTD is proposed by using a moving thermal conductive medium in four rectangular modules on the background thermal conductive plate. The thermal target region within the proposed open JFTD is an isotropic thermal conductive medium (e.g., the same as the background medium), which can be connected to the external region. The simulated results show that the proposed open JFTD performs as a thermal concentrator for the heat flows with incident angles between 0° and the critical angle and a thermal cloak for the heat flows with incident angles between the critical angle and 90°, which can be applied to the separate processing of multiple heat flows from different directions in various integrated systems.