Realizing the multifunctional metamaterial for fluid flow in a porous medium

Metamaterials are artificial materials that can achieve unusual properties through unique structures. In particular, their “invisibility” property has attracted enormous attention due to its little or negligible disturbance to the background field that avoids detection. This invisibility feature is not only useful for the optical field, but it is also important for any field manipulation that requires minimum disturbance to the background, such as the flow field manipulation inside the human body. There are several conventional invisible metamaterial designs: a cloak can isolate the influence between the internal and external fields, a concentrator can concentrate the external field to form an intensified internal field, and a rotator can rotate the internal field by a specific angle with respect to the external field. However, a multifunctional invisible device that can continuously tune across all these functions has never been realized due to its challenging requirements on material properties. Inside a porous medium flow, however, we overcome these challenges and realize such a multifunctional metamaterial. Our hydrodynamic device can manipulate both the magnitude and the direction of the internal flow and, at the same time, make negligible disturbance to the external flow. Thus, we integrate the functions of the cloak, concentrator, and rotator within one single hydrodynamic metamaterial, and such metamaterials may find potential applications in biomedical areas such as tissue engineering and drug release.