Matthew Sparkes is a writer.
Wrinkles in this material can help hide something.
The person is Xuesong Jiang.
Camouflage materials are limited by the need for power or external sensors as they record video of what is behind an object to be hidden and displayed on the front. Instead, a new material inspired by squid and octopuses shines a torch on an object to match its surroundings.
A group of people at a university in China have created a material that has different thermal expansion rates. One layer is made to be the same color as the background, and the other is made to be different.
When the material is cool, the layers have different tensions, which causes smallwrinkles on the surface. Light shone onto the surface warms up the layers, causing them to expand at different rates and making the two materials smooth again.
Any reflected light can be controlled with the creation and eradication of thesewrinkles. When the wrinkled state occurs, a mixed spectrum of bright colour is reflected, but when the material smoothes out, the reflected colour matches the background, and whatever is clad in the material becomes camouflaged.
Researchers believe that the system could create inexpensive camouflage uniforms. The US Army has been looking for proposals for Wearable Camouflage.
The journal is called PNAS.
There are more on these topics.
