Near-field radiative heat transfer between general materials and metamaterials

Abstract

We investigated the near-field radiative heat transfer between general materials and metamaterials. We studied the effects of metamaterial parameters on the radiative heat exchange and used three kinds of natural or artificially-constructed materials such as Al, boron-doped Si and metamaterials as examples. We calculated and analyzed the near-field radiative heat transfer processes between two semi-infinite bodies. The numerical results indicate that the radiative heat exchange between the two different materials may be less or more than the radiative heat exchange between the corresponding identical materials. It was found out to depend on the radiative properties of the materials. The work would provide a valuable reference for the selection of practical materials. The swift advancement of micro/nanotechnology strongly encourages the development of highly-efficient miniature energy conversion and utilization devices [1][2][3][4] in which microscopic thermal transport is very complicated and needs to be considered [5]. Meanwhile, the appearance of a variety of man-made materials brings new challenges in near-field thermal radiation.As an important part of the micro/nanoscale radiative heat transfer, various aspects of near-field radiative heat transfer has been studied by many scholars [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. From their investigations we know that the macroscopic thermal radiation law fails to describe the radiative heat transfer processes at the subwavelength scale. Additionally, the near-field radiative heat transfer rate between two closely spaced bodies may increase by several orders of magnitude compared with that between two blackbodies at the macroscopic level because of near-field effects such as wave interference, photon tunneling and the excitation of surface waves [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Recently, the near-field radiative heat transfer between two metamaterials was studied theoretically by Joulain et al. [19] and they found that the excitation of surface waves during TE polarization and the ferromagnetic behavior of the metamaterials will result in new channels for heat transfer and will enhance the radiative heat transfer. Therefore, the near-field radiative heat transfer becomes much more complicated because of the presence of metamataterials. However, some interesting questions arise such as the type of effects that may be induced by the parameters of metamaterials on the near-field radiative heat transfer, the results of the near-field radiative heat transfer between metamaterials and nonmagnetic materials (i.e. relative permeability μ=1) and the difference in the near-field radiative heat transfer compared with that between the corresponding identical metamaterials or between the corresponding identical nonmagnetic materials. Wang et al. [12] analyzed the effects of material parameters as well as the temperature on the near-field heat transfer between the two identical normal materials using the Drude and Lorentz models. Fu and Zhang [20] co...

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