Deep-Learning-Enabled Intelligent Design of Thermal Metamaterials

Thermal metamaterials are mixture-based materials that are engineered to manipulate, control, and process the flow of heat, enabling numerous advanced thermal metadevices. Conventional thermal metamaterials are predominantly designed with tractable regular geometries owing to the delicate analytical solution and easy-to-implement effective structures. Nevertheless, it is challenging to achieve the design of thermal metamaterials with arbitrary geometry, letting alone intelligent (automatic, real-time, and customizable) design of thermal metamaterials. Here, an intelligent design framework of thermal metamaterials is presented via a pre-trained deep learning model, which gracefully achieves the desired functional structures of thermal metamaterials with exceptional speed and efficiency, regardless of arbitrary geometry. It possesses incomparable versatility and is of great flexibility to achieve the corresponding design of thermal metamaterials with different background materials, anisotropic geometries, and thermal functionalities. The transformation thermotics-induced, freeform, background-independent, and omnidirectional thermal cloaks, whose structural configurations are automatically designed in real-time according to shape and background, are numerically and experimentally demonstrated. This study sets up a novel paradigm for an automatic and real-time design of thermal metamaterials in a new design scenario. More generally, it may open a door to the realization of an intelligent design of metamaterials in also other physical domains.