Two Singapore Based Teams Create Heat Cloaking Device

Cloaking devices have always been a subject up for debate, either shape cloaking, thermal cloaking or any other type of cloaking device. Apparently, thermal cloaking has been a subject more people were interested in, and even brought forth from the imaginary realm to the real world.

Two teams based in Singapore have allegedly created two different types of thermal cloaking devices. Scientists have been fiddling with ways to cloak things for some time, and found out that microwaves can be bent easily. From there, light bending and infrared radiation, as well as sound, were the main topic in terms of testing and creating devices for bending the latter and devise cloaking devices.

Based on these studies, the two Singapore research teams applied the study on heat. Although heat is not a wave media such as the ones previously mentioned, they have stated that heat as well can be cloaked under certain circumstances. The idea behind cloaking heat is to create an environment where heat diffusion does not occur into an object placed into that environment. Instead, like wave cloaking, the heat is caused to stray from its normal path and move around the object instead of into it.

The first team created a heat cloak by binding strips of metal and polystyrene together and then placing the result inside of a block made of thermal conducting material. The arrangement allowed for thermal cloaking of an aluminium cylinder placed inside. The second team created their device by trapping a pocket of air inside a block made of stainless steel, having the air pocket was lined with copper. An object placed inside the air pocket was heat cloaked.

Both teams do not currently have a specific application in mind for their heat cloaking device, but suggest heat cloaking might be useful for managing heat in electronic circuits. One such application might be inside of cell phones as way to prevent batteries from overheating.

Thank you Phys.org for providing us with this information