Effect of Interfacial Thermal Resistance in a Thermal Cloak

Abstract

When heat transfers through the interface between two different materials, it will encounter an interfacial thermal resistance (ITR) that makes the temperature discontinuous. This effect has been totally ignored so far in the research on a thermal cloak, in particular when the thermal cloak is built with multilayer structures. In this paper, we investigate the effect of ITR on the performance of a thermal cloak by both an analytical method and a numerical method. Our results show that the existence of ITR will distort the external field and thus destroy the cloak. Moreover, we find that the effect of ITR can be quantified by a parameter called the ``characteristic length.''