Pseudoconformal Thermal Metamaterials Enabled by Thickness Engineering in a Single Material

Heat manipulation is one of the primary challenges in modern energy utilization and conversion. Although thermal metamaterials have emerged as a promising tool, most designs require complex composite media to achieve customized thermal properties, such as anisotropy, which increases fabrication difficulty and generates adverse effects due to interfacial thermal resistance. Moving beyond these limitations, pseudoconformal mapping is used to regulate the temperature gradient in a confocally elliptical core–shell structure while maintaining the matrix temperature undistorted. The geometric scheme predicts isotropic thermal conductivity and nonuniform volumetric heat capacity, enabling precise transient heat control. A platform inspired by metasurfaces enables the realization of spatially distributed parameters via thickness engineering in a single material, as further confirmed by simulations and experiments. These findings facilitate transient thermal manipulation with straightforward structures and apply to other physical fields governed by the Laplace equation, such as mass transport, electrostatics, and magnetostatics.