Designing Heat Transfer on Objects Using Tunable Thermal-conductive Materials

2023

Tianyu Yu, et. al.

In this project, we explore a method using tunable thermal-conductive materials to design and leverage ambient heat transfer on objects. In contrast to prior work, which either used active electronics to create programmable thermal behavior or passive materials whicare limited to only one predefined temperature behavior, our method explores how to leverage passive material structures to create programmable thermal behaviors. We explore the material composition, fabrication techniques, design tools, and a range of applications that show the benefits.

Publication:

Thermaterial: Design and Fabrication of Objects with Programmable Thermal Behaviors Based on Fluidic Composites (in submission)

Contributions:

Led the project, including conceptualization, experiments, design and fabrication methods, and application demonstration.

Tunable thermal-conductive composites

We designed a fluidic composite with fluidic channels embedded. By altering the material compositions through the infilled fluidic medium (e.g., water and air), we can adjust the overall thermal insulance and heat capacity of the composites accordingly.

Material structure with tunable thermal insulance

Fabrication of the composites

We demonstrate a series of methods to fabricate both the rigid and the flexible versions of the composites, as well as the method to configure the thermal insulance of the composites.

Fabricate rigid composites with 3D printing and post-processing steps.

Fabricate flexible composites with silicone casting.

Install the internal fluidic medium to configure the thermal insulance.

Applications

We demonstrate a series of applications with programmable heat transfer behaviors within objects, using the tunable thermal-conductive materials, including (a,b) an ice-therapy wearable with tunable cooling effect, (c) a cup with tunable cooling rate, (d) a battery box with dynamic thermal-insulated enclosure, (e,g) a reconfigurable passive thermal marker, (f,h) a lunchbox with anisotropic thermal-insulated layout.

Design tool

To assist designers and researchers in creating thermal behaviors on objects, we provided a user interface, which features in an integrated program to generate the composite structures and a series of calculators that help users compute the thermal behaviors.