Active thermal cloaking and mimicking

Active exterior cloaking for the two-dimensional Helmholtz equation with complex wavenumbers and application to thermal cloaking

We design sources for the two-dimensional Helmholtz equation that can cloak an object by cancelling out the incident field in a region, without the sources completely surrounding the object to hide. As in previous work for real positive wavenumbers, the sources are also determined by the Green identities. The novelty is that we prove that the same approach works for complex wavenumbers which makes it applicable to a variety of media, including media with dispersion, loss and gain. Furthermore, by deriving bounds on Graf's addition formulas with complex arguments, we obtain new estimates that allow to quantify the quality of the cloaking effect. We illustrate our results by applying them to achieve active exterior cloaking for the heat equation. This article is part of the theme issue 'Wave generation and transmission in multi-scale complex media and structured metamaterials (part 2)'.

Fast active thermal cloaking through PDE-constrained optimization and reduced-order modelling

In this paper, we show how to efficiently achieve thermal cloaking from a computational standpoint in several virtual scenarios by controlling a distribution of active heat sources. We frame this problem in the setting of PDE-constrained optimization, where the reference field is the solution of the time-dependent heat equation in the absence of the object to cloak. The optimal control problem then aims at actuating the space–time control field so that the thermal field outside the obstacle is indistinguishable from the reference field. In particular, we consider multiple scenarios where material’s thermal diffusivity, source intensity and obstacle’s temperature are allowed to vary within a user-defined range. To tackle the thermal cloaking problem in a rapid and reliable way, we rely on a parametrized reduced order model built through the reduced basis method, thus entailing huge computational speedups compared with a high-fidelity, full-order model exploiting the finite-element method while dealing both with complex target shapes and disconnected control domains.