A concept of heat dissipation coefficient for thermal cloak based on entropy

generation approach
Guoqiang Xu, and Haochun Zhang

Citation: AIP Advances 6, 095107 (2016);

View online: https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4962922
View Table of Contents: http://aip.scitation.org/toc/adv/6/9
Published by the American Institute of Physics

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 AIP ADVANCES 6, 095107 (2016)

A concept of heat dissipation coefficient for thermal

cloak based on entropy generation approach
Guoqiang Xu and Haochun Zhanga
School Enengy Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology,
Harbin 150001, China
(Received 15 July 2016; accepted 5 September 2016; published online 13 September 2016)

In this paper, we design a 3D spherical thermal cloak with eight material lay-
ers based on transformation thermodynamics and it worked at steady state before
approaching ‘static limit’. Different from the present research, we introduce local
entropy generation to present the randomness in the cloaking system and propose
the concept of a heat dissipation coefficient which is used to describe the capac-
ity of heat diffusion in the ‘cloaking’ and ‘protected’ region to characterize the
cloaking performance on the basis of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. We indi-
cate the ability of heat dissipation for the thermal cloak responds to changes in
anisotropy (caused by the change in the number of layers) and differential tem-
peratures. In addition, we obtain a comparison of results of different cloaks and
believe that the concept of a heat dissipation coefficient can be an evaluation cri-
terion for the thermal cloak. © 2016 Author(s). All article content, except where
otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4962922]

I. INTRODUCTION
An invisibility cloak that can hide an object in different fields has aroused significant attention.
Currently, many studies on invisibility cloaks, such as the optical,1–4 electromagnetic,5–8 acoustic,9–11
and elastodynamic12,13 cloaks based on wave fields, have been investigated by simulations and exper-
iments. However, the research of thermal cloaks using diffuse fields has been a concern in recent
years. The idea of transformation thermodynamics based on the invariability of the steady-state heat
conduction equation was used to design both a spherical and prolate spheroid cloak.14 Different
multi-layers cloaking schemes with large gradient of thermal conductivities was reported.14–28 A 2D
micro-structured thermal cloak has been fabricated and experimentally demonstrated.15 The thermal
conductivity in the distorted coordinates16–20 and the mechanism of predefined heat flux paths are
further researched.21–24 Considering the difficulty in fabricating a 3D cloak, the study of 3D thermal
cloaks has a late start. Xu and co-workers25 designed an ultrathin 3D thermal cloak on the basis of
Ref.8. In addition to improving the usability, a bilayer thermal cloak only employing bulk isotropic
materials was built.26 From the temperature gradient distribution, the temperature deformation (TD)
was defined to describe the cloaking characteristics of different schemes.26–28 Some kinds of cloaks
have been reported such as AH and AI cloaks.26 AH cloak is built with different regular materials
which is with a gradient of heat conductivity between adjacent layers26,27 and each layer is made
of one kind of regular material. AI cloak is built with alternately placed meta-material and regular
material in each layer.15
Considering that 3D thermal protection is a promising technology in engineering applications,
the evaluation index of different cloak structures should be improved to meet engineering demands.
Though the method of temperature deformation 25-28 can qualitatively characterize the capacity of
a thermal cloak, there are still some items deserving a deep discussion, such as the heat dissipation
in the cloaking system. In this paper, we move one step forward to extend the 2D cloak in Ref.15 to

a Electronic mail: zhc7@vip.163.com

2158-3226/2016/6(9)/095107/7 6, 095107-1 © Author(s) 2016

095107-2 G. Xu and H. Zhang AIP Advances 6, 095107 (2016)

a 3D structure, and introduce local entropy generation29,30 to present the randomness in the thermal
cloak. Finally, the concept of a heat dissipation coefficient is obtained through a transient plane source
method to express the cloaking capability of the 2D and 3D thermal cloaks.

II. THEORETICAL METHOD AND PHYSICAL MODEL

Because the material of the multilayer structure ball is heterogeneous, we need to describe the
heat distribution where a region with radius Ri is compressed into the region Ri-1 <r<Ri through a
geometric transform based on Pendry’s work 5 in spherical coordinates. Upon a change from Cartesian
coordinates (x, y, z) to spherical coordinate (r 0, θ 0, ϕ 0) described by lame parameters. The transform
process is provided in the supplementary material. The heat transfer equation can be expressed as:

0 0 ∂T (Ri − Ri−1 )2 ∂ ∂T ∂ ∂T
! !
1
ρc = kr 0 +
0 kϕ 0
∂t Ri2 ∂r 0 ∂r (r 0 − Ri )2 sin2 θ ∂ϕ 0 ∂ϕ
∂ ∂T
!!
1
+ kθ sin θ 0 (1)
(r − Ri ) sin θ ∂θ
0 2 0 0 ∂θ
where ρ0 is the density, c’ is the specific heat capacity, T is the transient temperature (K), and k is
the thermal conductivity of different positions in the multilayer structure.
Following their previous work,5,15,17 we consider the thermal conductivity in spherical coordi-
nates and obtain an expression of the elevation component with the same method:
!2
R2
kϕ = k0 ≥ k0 (2)
R2 − R1
The thermal conductivity of the diameter and elevation component can be expressed as
following:15,17
!2 !2
R2 r − R1
kr = k0 ≤ k0 (3)
R2 − R1 r
!2
R2
k θ = k0 ≥ k0 (4)
R2 − R1
In this paper, we supply the cloaking character simulation of our cloak by the finite element
method using Fluent 14.0. Our model consisted of three regions, named the “protected” region
(copper ball), cloaking region (eight composite material layers) which was proved advantages through
comparison simulation results of seven and nine layers, and a background made of an aluminum
alloy (92Al–8Mg). Figure S4 shows the temperature of point (0, 0, 0) with different material layer
numbers in the supplementary material. We set a Radio of 25 mm copper ball in the center of
the “protected” region as a “protected” object. The thermal conductivity of the copper ball was
k0 = 398 W /m·K. Inspired by the experiments,15 we chose a PDMS composite material and copper to
manufacture the cloaking layers filling between the inner radio R1 and the outer radio R8 . We regarded
R1 = 25 mm as the inner radio. According to the viewpoint,24 a larger thickness of the material layer
contributed to a smaller deviation of the heat flux bending angle, namely, a material layer with a
larger thickness can force the heat flux to bypass the “protected” object easier and have little effect
on the outer space of the cloaking region. Hence, the perturbation of the heat flux in the “protected”
region was infinitesimal. We adjusted the thickness of the layers to 3 mm for each layer to enhance
the cloaking effect on the basis of Ref.15 and 24. Based on equation [2], [3] and [4], the thermal
conductivities(W/K·m) led to k1 = 0.15, k2 = 398, k3 = 2.87, k4 = 394.04, k5 = 11.55, k6 = 385.1,
k7 = 18.83, and k8 = 378.73 through summing up the conductivities in component of three directions.
For the background, considering the actual processing, we used two cuboid parts with dimensions
200mm (length), 200mm (width), and 100mm (height) made of an aluminum alloy joined together
for a cube space with length dimensions of 200mm. The thermal conductivity of the background was
kb = 107 W/m·K, and the cloaking region with the “protected” object was placed in the center of the
background.
095107-3 G. Xu and H. Zhang AIP Advances 6, 095107 (2016)

III. RESULTS
To present the results of the cloak, a simulation based on the following conditions was performed:
the ambient temperature outside the background was 293.15 K (20◦ C), a background wall in Fig. 1
was seen as a hot wall with a steady temperature of 373.15 K (100◦ C), and the opposite wall was set
as a cold wall with the same temperature as the space outside the background to reduce the influence
of convection caused by the temperature difference. Another two reference structures were built to
study the characteristics of the cloak. One was the thermal cloak only with the PDMS layer, and the
other was the background without the cloaking and “protected” regions.
The temperature distributions of the three reference structures at different times t = 5 s, 300 s, and
600 s are shown in Fig.2. As column a shows, when the heat flux reaches the cloaking region, severe
perturbation on the isothermal part approaching the cloaking region was observed, and the heat accu-
mulated at the edge of the cloaking region, as shown in a1. For the rest of the same isothermal (away

FIG. 1. (a) Schematic illustration of our cloak with eight composite material layers. (b) The entire model of the thermal cloak
for simulating.

FIG. 2. Simulation transient temperature distributions at different times 5s, 300s, 600s of x-y plane (z=0). (a) Results for the
structure of eight layers. (b) Results for the structure of PDMS only. (c) Results for the structure of background.
095107-4 G. Xu and H. Zhang AIP Advances 6, 095107 (2016)

from the cloaking region), the perturbation reduces until the curve recovers to the initial state without
wrapping. When the perturbation of the heat flux bypassed and wrapped the cloaking region, the per-
turbations of heat flux and temperature gradient were not observed in the “protected” region as nothing
happened there, and the copper ball temperature fluctuated slowly compared with the background, pre-
sented in (a2) and (a3). Parts of the isothermal in the cloaking region formed arcs after wrapping along
the profile curve of the “protected” region, and the perturbation became turbulent near the boundary of
the copper ball. The isothermal deformation reduced with the heat flux away from the cloaking region,
such that a small amount of heat diffused into the “protected” region and the temperature rose after a
long time.
To examine the cloaking characteristics of the thermal cloak, we adopted the local entropy
generation rate.30 The entropy generation consisted of a fluid flow part and heat transfer part in non-
equilibrium thermodynamics. However, the heat transfer in the solid in the reference structure and
the fluid flow entropy generation are not considered in this paper. Considering the transformation of
the coordinates, the equation of entropy generation rate is simplified as:
!2 !2 !2
k 0(Ri − Ri−1 )2 * ∂T 1 ∂T 1 ∂T
σ= + + + (5)
, ∂r ∂θ 0 (r 0 − Ri )2 sin2 θ 0 ∂ϕ 0
0
T 2 Ri2 (r 0 − Ri )2 -

where σ is the entropy source(W ·m−3 ·K−1 ).

As a fair comparison, we also built a control model with only the copper ball in the background.
Fig.3 demonstrates the local entropy generation rate distribution of the monitoring surface (Fig.S3 of
the supplementary material shows the local entropy generation rate of measuring points). When the
heat flux enters into the “cloaking” region, the energy inside the “cloaking” region is unevenly dis-
tributed because of the difference in the thermal conductivities. The disorder of the energy causes the
local entropy generation rate to drop in steps; most of the energy dissipation occurs in the multilayers
and the heat flux is almost zero in the “protected” region, which makes the local entropy generation
rate distribution a hole. Compared with Fig.(3a), the entropy generation rate in the “protected” region
of Fig.(3b) also approaches zero, but is higher than that of Fig.(3a). The local entropy generation rate
of the other reference structure is presented in Fig.(3c) and Fig.(3d). The local entropy generation
rate in the central region is similar with the rest of the background. The peak of the energy dissipation
occurs in the vertical direction of the heat flux in Fig.(3a) and Fig.(3b). However, it occurs in the
parallel direction of the heat flux in Fig.3c. Taken together, the local entropy generation rate of the
backgrounds in Figs. (3a), (3c), and (3d) are close and lower than that of Fig.(3b). It can be seen that the
material layers force the change of heat flux corresponding to the downstream transient temperature
field to transfer to the interior of the cloaking layers where the dissipation occurred, and the thermal

FIG. 3. Entropy generation distribution of monitoring surface for different reference structure at 600s (line y=0 is the symmetry
axis). (a). Eight layers thermal cloak. (b). PDMS only thermal cloak. (c). The background only with copper ball. (d). A pure
background.
095107-5 G. Xu and H. Zhang AIP Advances 6, 095107 (2016)

cloak with the multilayer structure has a smaller influence on the environment outside the “cloaking”
region.
In order to quantitatively describe the influence of heat flux in the system, we reference the
transient plane source method29 to describe the heat dissipation capability of the thermal cloak.
The entire system is an open system, and there is irreversible heat loss caused by non-isothermal
heat transfer inside the “cloaking” region. The energy of the irreversible heat loss caused by the
temperature gradient can be expressed as follows through the entropy equation:30
  
T10 · T20 T10 · T20
q0 = δq 0 = dSg = σ · dt (6)
ϑ ϑ

The heat loss caused by dissipation is:

q0 (Ri − Ri−1 )2 ∂ 2 ϑ ∂2ϑ ∂2ϑ

!
1 1
= α · + + (7)
ρ0 c 0 Ri2 ∂r 02 (r 0 − Ri )2 sin2 θ 0 ∂ϕ 02 (r 0 − Ri )2 sin θ 0 ∂θ 02

In the formula, the left is the generalized dissipation flow, α is the phenomenological coefficient
that can be considered as the heat dissipation coefficient, it can be used to describe the heat dissipation
in the thermal cloak layers caused by irreversible heat loss, and the rest of the formula is the generalized
dissipation force, where ϑ is the temperature change. The irreversible heat loss and the gradient of
temperature change are simultaneous through the heat dissipation coefficient α. A Green function
is introduced to present the temperature changes. The heat loss in the radial direction is seen as a
set of dissipations where the temperature change response to the heating time in the system can be
expressed as:
$
q0 1
ϑr (r 0, τ) = √
(2π) ρ c 8 πατ 3
2 0 0 

 (cos2 ϕ 0 sin2 θ 0 + sin2 θ 0 sin2 ϕ 0 + cos2 θ 0)(r 0R − R2 )2 

i i  0 0
× exp −
 4ατ(Ri − Ri−1 )2  dθ dϕ dτ (8)


The expression of heat dissipation coefficient for thermal cloak is obtained through integrating:

α · exp B · α /2 = A exp(γ)
 3

(9)

Where, A = (r 0Ri − Ri2 )/4τ(Ri − Ri−1 ); B = (4πτ)1.5 · ρ0c 0 ϑ(r 0, τ)/q 0 τ, γ is the Euler constant and
γ = 0.577216.
The time-dependent dissipation coefficient of the reference structure is obtained through
MATLAB calculation. Then, we averaged the answers in the “cloaking” and “protected” regions
to obtain α of the cloak, which is shown in Fig.4 The α of different structures are demon-
strated in Fig.(4a). Obviously, the dissipation coefficient of the structure without the cloaking
layer is steady and much lower than those of other structures. The upper-right inset shows α
of the three cloaking schemes; it is clear that α decreases with a decrease in the layer num-
bers, which is induced by decreasing anisotropy, and becomes more balanced after 300 s. The
α of the eight-layered thermal cloak with different differential temperatures is demonstrated in
Fig.(4b). It indicates that α decreases with the increase of differential temperatures, and the
upper-right inset shows the value of α after 400 s. The values grow closer with the increase
in differential temperatures, which is induced by increasing the speed of the self-organizing
phenomenon.
Comprehensive comparisons amongst the four reference structures indicate that the eight-
layered thermal cloak performs better than the other two models with two layers and only the
PDMS layer as the largest value of α. The slopes of the curves in Fig.(4a) become smaller with
the increase in the heating time because of the transient of the cloaking functions. Furthermore,
095107-6 G. Xu and H. Zhang AIP Advances 6, 095107 (2016)

FIG. 4. (a). The time-dependent heat dissipation coefficient of the ‘cloaking’ regions in the reference structure. (b). The
time-dependent dissipation coefficient of eight layers thermal cloak with different differential temperatures.

the increasing differential temperature has less of an effect on the dissipation coefficient because
the physical parameters become closer and the dissipative process is enhanced with the increasing
temperature.

IV. CONCLUSIONS
In summary, we designed three types of spherical thermal cloaks with different material layers
based on transformation thermodynamics. From the calculation results of the reference structure on
the temperature fields, all of our thermal cloaks had an effect on cloaking; however, the temperature
of ‘protected’ region didn’t change any more after it reached ‘static limit’ which was approached
asymptotically for large times.15 We introduced the entropy theory to perform a qualitative analysis
of the cloaking performance of the cloaking schemes. It indicated that the thermal cloak with more
layers performed better as the local entropy generation rate in the center of the “protected” region
decreased with increasing layer numbers. Finally, on the basis of entropy analysis, we proposed
the concept of a heat diffusion coefficient which could be used to characterize the capacity of heat
diffusion in the cloaking and protected region caused by irreversible heat loss and obtained the
expression. By using MATLAB, the conclusions of heat diffusion coefficient versus time was drawn
to quantitatively describe the heat diffusion in the “cloaking” and “protected” regions. Furthermore,
the heat diffusion coefficient α responded to the change of anisotropy (caused by the change of
095107-7 G. Xu and H. Zhang AIP Advances 6, 095107 (2016)

layer number) and differential temperature. Therefore, the cloaking diffusion coefficient α can be
used to reflect the cloaking capability.

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
See supplementary material for the complete transform process, simulation results and the
comparison result of different schemes in this article.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work is supported by the Foundation for Innovative Research Groups of the National Natural
Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51421063) and the National Natural Science Foundation of
China (Grant No. 51536001).
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