Most of the everywhere heat sources spanning from the micro- to the macro-scale remain disregarded and their latent potential is lost. Thermotronics is a young discipline offering promising options for the onset of a new paradigm in the employment of heat, proposing effective ways of taking advantage of these sources. Managing thermal currents as proficiently as electric currents, for instance, would imply progress in subjects such as thermal management and energy storage, and impact the development of new ones such as thermal sensing and computing. The research of this project deals with this matter by investigating the behavior of thermal devices that can be implemented for smart thermal management.
- The primary objective of the action is to address fluctuations, dynamics and dissipation in thermotronic devices based on nanoscale photon transport, contributing so to the development of new mechanisms to manage and exploit radiative heat fluxes.
In the vicinity of a hot solid, a strong electromagnetic energy density exists because of the presence of an evanescent field. In the form of thermal radiation, this energy can be transferred without contact from a hot source to colder objects and then implemented in different applications. A situation can be envisaged, for instance, in which autonomous sensors governed by thermal signals launch specific tasks. Moreover, the potential of thermal radiation can be exploited in conversion processes leading to usable energy. At the nanoscale, a hot object can be considered as a source to power a conversion device. This offers the possibility of obtaining clean energy from waste heat, then covering industrial and social energetic needs. By combining different radiation-driven mechanisms, hybrid electric-thermal circuits can be designed for an advantageous manipulation of heat.
In conclusion, this project contribute novel methods to study systems driven by near-field thermal radiation. While environmental noise weakly impacts the state of the elements of the system in typical configurations, external control of emission properties leads to a significant change in the magnitude of radiative heat fluxes. By using graphene and materials supporting polaritonic resonances, we shown that the thermal state of active elements can be modulated at kHz frequencies. This provides means for relatively fast control of the system’s dynamics and the associated heat exchange. Furthermore, dissipation in irreversible processes associated with radiative heat exchange can be accounted for by quantifying the entropy production. We developed a non-equilibrium thermodynamic framework describing entropic contributions in many-body systems with near-field interactions. The project paves the way for innovative strategies for an active control of radiative heat fluxes with applications in smart radiative thermal management.
