Binary masses manipulation with composite bilayer metamaterial

Abstract Flexible and efficient mass manipulation is of critical importance in multiple fields of industrial separation, membrane science, chemical production, and biotechnology. Owing to the extensive investigation of transformation optics/thermodynamics, some pioneering attempts of mass diffusion metamaterial are proposed to motivate the traditional techniques. However, most of the current works are dependent on specific spatial transformations, thus leading to the conventional imperfects of transformation-based metamaterial in mass manipulations. Here, we propose a bilayer meta-device for binary masses manipulation (O2 and N2) by directly solving static Fick’s law. Only homogeneous media are employed in such design owing to the independence of spatial transformations. The O2 avoiding and N2 concentrating behaviors with non-distortion concentration fields reveal the manipulative significance. The findings may promote the research on mass diffusion metamaterial towards easy obtainment, and open up an avenue for innovating the conventional mass manipulation techniques.