Inverse design of thermal metamaterials with holey engineering strategy

Manipulating heat with thermal metamaterials has garnered increasing attention for enabling underlying physics and promising applications. However, the frequently adopted strategy to fabricate thermal metamaterials is using layered structures, whose design space is limited and, thus, other strategies demand further exploring. Here, we propose the holey engineering strategy as an alternative to design thermal metamaterials based on genetic algorithm optimization. The design procedures are introduced in detail, and two metadevices including the thermal cloak and thermal concentrator, are designed and verified to demonstrate the feasibility and convenience of this strategy. This work proposes a new design method for thermal metamaterials and paves an efficient way for macroscopic heat flow manipulation. Published under an exclusive license by AIP Publishing.