Description du projet
Une gestion intelligente de la chaleur radiative grâce à des composants thermotroniques
La thermotronique offre des solutions prometteuses pour la gestion des sources de chaleur. Dans les composants thermotroniques, les courants de chaleur circulent en raison des différences de température appliquées. Dans les composants radiatifs, les photons thermiques circulent comme les électrons dans les appareils électroniques. L’échange de chaleur sans contact entre une source et un récepteur est contrôlé par un transistor thermique radiatif. Lorsque les composants sont de taille nanométrique, le bruit ambiant pose problème. Le projet RTTT, financé par l’UE, a pour objectif d’étudier les fluctuations, la dynamique et la dissipation des composants thermotroniques basés sur le transport des photons à l’échelle nanométrique et fonctionnant sous l’effet des perturbations du bruit ambiant. Les paramètres définissant les états des composants seront traités comme des variables stochastiques à partir desquelles des conditions de stabilité pour les états d’équilibre pourront être déduites. Ces travaux jetteront les bases de stratégies innovantes pour contrôler activement les flux de chaleur radiative.
Objectif
Thermotronics is a developing discipline that offers promising options to manage heat sources and proposes new ways of exploiting signals encoded by heat. Analogously to what happens in electronic components in which electric currents flow as a consequence of potential differences, thermotronic components are devices in which heat currents flow due to applied temperature differences. In radiative components, thermal photons flow as electrons flow in their electronic counterparts. Among these devices, a radiative thermal transistor controls the heat exchange without contact between a source and a receiver. When these components are reduced to the nanoscale, the environmental noise becomes important and is a major cause for concern. The objective of the proposal is to address fluctuations, dynamics and dissipation in thermotronic components, based on nanoscale photon transport and working under environmental noise perturbations. This is achieved by considering the parameters that define the states of these components as stochastic variables, from which stability conditions for equilibrium states can be derived and the dynamics under general nonequilibrium scenarios can be characterized. The proposed scheme provides novel methods to estimate the mean life of the states of a thermal memory and to quantify the time response of thermotronic components, including the impact of environmental conditions which are of prime importance for applications. A nonequilibrium thermodynamics framework dealing with the associated stochastic dynamics is also proposed to account for dissipation as a key element to optimize the performance of these devices. The proposal paves the way for innovative strategies for an active control of radiative heat fluxes, strengthening tools and concepts for smart radiative thermal management. The proposed methods for the description of fluctuations, dynamics and dissipation can be applied to any other many-body system with radiative interactions.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
MSCA-IF-EF-RI - RI – Reintegration panelCoordinateur
08007 Barcelona
Espagne