Nowadays, many challenges in energy and information fields are closely related to heat transfer. This involves how to reduce the energy consumption of daily needs such as refrigeration and heat preservation, how to reuse the waste energy dissipated by heat, how to efficiently heat the electronic components, as well as how to detect the thermal infrared signals. Therefore, it is of great significance to develop and design new materials and devices to realize intelligent regulation of heat transfer process. In recent years, a series of important academic achievements have been made in this field, involving lots of subjects like physics, materials science and information science. Recently, Li Ying, a research professor in ISEE of Zhejiang University, published a review paper entitled Transforming heat transfer with thermal metamaterials and devices as the first author in the international top journal Nature Reviews materials (if: 71.189), systematically introducing the related work, and do the summarizing and prospecting work. The paper partners include Prof.LI Baowen and Dr.Xu Zheng in University of Colorado at Boulder, Prof. FAN Shanhui, Dr.LI Wei in Stanford University, Prof.CHENG Wei Qiu in National University of Singapore, Prof.HAN Tiancheng in University of Electronic Science and technology, and Dr.Li Jiaxing in Harbin University of technology. The reviewers highly praised the paper providing a rich and profound review of the science of thermal materials and will undoubtedly help researchers in this field and other fields.
The artificial structure design of different scales for heat conduction and radiation has led to many active research fields, such as heat transfer materials, nano phonology, far field and mobilization thermal radiation regulation. However, the research focuses on the special material properties and physical properties of artificial structure.
The review is divided into three parts. The first discusses the regulation of heat conduction, introducing the macro scale materials, micro scale nano phonon crystals and nano phonon materials. The second part discusses the regulation of thermal radiation, introducing the basic properties of far-field thermal radiation regulation and related applications, and the main methods for the enhancement and regulation of near-field thermal radiation. The third part discusses the various methods of active heat transfer regulation.
Figure 1. Regulation of micro heat conduction: phononic nanocrystals and phononic metamaterials
Fig. 2. Control of far-field thermal radiation: methods of artificial photonic structure and time modulation, and applications of radiation cooling and thermal photovoltaic
Finally, the main challenge of heat transfer regulation by using thermal super structure materials and devices is the coordination of multi-scale, multi physical field and various heat transfer forms. At present, there are some attempts to realize the micro conduction super structure materials and multi physical and thermal control, but it is still in the initial stage. The potential development of topological effect, thermal wave effect and quantum effect are also prospected.
Link to paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41578-021-00283-2
Li's personal homepage: https://person.zju.edu.cn/en/0020089
