Computational design of thermal metamaterials

Where and when

June, 7th 2023 - Villa Cambiaso - Salone nobile - h.12 p.m.

Summary : 
A metamaterial is an engineered material whose properties do not depend on its chemical constituents but rather on its internal structure. Sometimes, these properties are exotic (negative Poisson ratio and thermal expansion, negative apparent thermal conductivity, acoustic etc.), beyond those found in nature or in the market, that's what meta stands for. In other cases, metamaterial properties are not extraordinary but are “à la carte”, i.e., specially tailored to fabricate a device with an optimal response. These are the metamaterials to be discussed in this seminar. Special emphasis is put on thermal metamaterials for heat flux manipulation tasks (cloaking, concentration, shielding, diversion), which were originally designed using the classical transformation-based approach inherited from Electromagnetism, constrained to a few tasks in simple geometries. . Then, we introduce the optimization-based approach for metamaterial design (OBMD), which largely supersede the classical approach in terms of versatility for geometries and tasks. It consists in solving an optimization problem where the objective function defines the error in achieving a desired task, and the design variables define the heterogeneous metamaterial. Finally, we show applications of OBMD for several tasks of heat flux manipulation and thermal management involving linear and nonlinear heat conduction in steady and transient state.

Victor Fachinotti´s biosketch: 
Building Engineer, graduated from National University of Technology (UTN) at Paraná, Argentina, 1996. Doctor in Engineering with Mention on Computational Mechanics, graduated from Faculty of Engineering and Water Sciences (FICH), National University of the Littoral UNL) at Santa Fe, Argentina, 2001. Postdoc at Center for Material Forming (CEMEF), School of Mines of Paris at Sophia Antipolis, France, 2001-2004. Researcher from the Argentinean Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) at the Research Center for Computational Methods (CIMEC) at Santa Fe, Argentina, started 2006, “Principal” since 2020. President of the Argentinean Association for Computational Mechanics (AMCA), since 2017. Member of the General Council of the International Association for Computational Mechanics (IACM), since 2017. Main interests: Nonlinear finite element analysis in thermomechanics, computational metallurgy, computational design of metamaterials, building energy simulation.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5702-6274

Contacts

prof. Antonio Caggiano (antonio.caggiano@unige.it)

Last update 30 May 2023