Anomalous Transient Heat Conduction in Fractal Metamaterials

Abstract: Transient dynamics of heat conduction in isotropic fractal metamaterials is investigated. By using the Laplacian operator in non-integer dimension, we analytically and numerically study the effect of fractal dimensionality on the evolution of the temperature profile, heat flux and excess energy under certain initial and boundary conditions. Particularly, with randomly distributed absorbing heat sinks in the fractal metamaterials, we obtain an anomalous non-exponential decay behavior of the heat pulse diffusion. and an optimal dimension for efficient heat absorption as a function of sink concentrations. Our results may have potential applications in controlling transient heat conduction in fractal media, which will be ubiquitous as porous, composite, networked, hierarchical meta-materials.