A concept of heat dissipation coefficient for thermal cloak based on entropy generation approach

In this paper, we design a 3D spherical thermal cloak with eight material layers based on transformation thermodynamics and it worked at steady state before approaching ‘static limit’. Different from the present research, we introduce local entropy generation to present the randomness in the cloaking system and propose the concept of a heat dissipation coefficient which is used to describe the capacity of heat diffusion in the ‘cloaking’ and ‘protected’ region to characterize the cloaking performance on the basis of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. We indicate the ability of heat dissipation for the thermal cloak responds to changes in anisotropy (caused by the change in the number of layers) and differential temperatures. In addition, we obtain a comparison of results of different cloaks and believe that the concept of a heat dissipation coefficient can be an evaluation criterion for the thermal cloak.