New Study Redefines Hydrodynamic Cloaking and Shielding of Objects

Jun, 2021 - By WMR

Researchers developed new methods to cloak and shield objects in electromagnetic flow field creating momentum, without using porous metamaterials, which could be implemented in real-time application.

A new strategy is proposed by the researchers at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Technical University of Darmstadt and IBM Research Europe to achieve hydrodynamic cloaking and shielding at the microscale. Mr. Steffen Hardt, with the research team at TU Darmstadt, stated that they were clued up with research based on the porous metamaterials, but as they move on with the research they claimed that their idea was enough to create a momentum in the required region around the object, which is to be cloaked or shielded without using such metamaterials. This justifies as external flow field and local flow field are superposed simultaneously, which leads to total flow field in the system where shielding and cloaking is achieved.

The key objective of the research was to signify the new techniques to perform cloaking and shielding the objects in the fluid flow field and make this practice functionally adaptive in real time rather than approaching methods based on metamaterials. Researchers developed the techniques that is used to manually inject the momentum, which is known as electro-osmotic flow. Electro-osmotic flow is the flow of liquid across the porous material, microchannels or other fluid conduit which was induced by an applied potential voltage.

Hardt, further, explained that if the external electric field is applied along the channel, then it will exert the force on vigorous charges and will turn the leftover liquid viscous. This effect can be defined as ‘conveyer belt’ where the velocity of the fluid could be controlled by embedded potential of electrode. The induced velocity in the channel can be adapted to change between cloaking and shielding conditions. The introduction of these new techniques and paradigm could also have implications in other areas of physics as it allowed physicists to cloak or shield the objects in electromagnetic and acoustic field.