Invisibility has been the subject of science fiction and fantasy literature since time immemorial, but in reality, the practical options to achieve it did not exist . The closest we could see was a Canadian startup that developed a shield in 2019 that made whatever was behind it difficult to see , but it was far from what we know for true invisibility and, even more, portable.
Now, a team of scientists from Seoul National University in South Korea has developed a type of camouflage mask that uses triggering heating and cooling mechanisms to mimic the colors of the surrounding environment. This wearable-like artificial skin is designed like patches, made of flexible pixelated screens that use sheets of thermochromic liquid crystal to quickly respond to the area around them and hide human skin in multispectral ranges.
This artificial skin would give soldiers the power of invisibility on the battlefield and make them undetectable by thermal imaging cameras, say the authors of the study published in the Advanced Functional Materials journal.
The soldiers of the future
That’s right, soldiers of the near future could blend invisibly with their surroundings, just like the alien monster did in the 1987 movie “Predator.” The new metamaterials represent that soldiers can not only blend in with their environment, but which can also be invisible to heat sensors, making them much more difficult to detect.
The camouflage “skin” would be made of flexible patches that would cover the soldiers making them invisible both day and night thanks to the possibility of being functionally invisible in the spectrum of visible to infrared light. The researchers claim that the technology is inspired by the camouflage capabilities of animals like squid and octopus, which are masters of disguise. These cephalopods vanish before our eyes and become, for example, colorful corals or groups of algae that sway with the ocean currents.
“In this study, a multispectral imperceptible skin is developed that allows human skin to actively blend with the background both in the integrated visible IR spectrum (infrared radiation) only by simple temperature control with a flexible bifunctional device (with cooling and active warming) “, expose the experts.
The pixelated screens cover the patches and consist of a thermoelectric unit (TE) that is cooled or heated by applying a reverse electrical current. The flexible patches change from red, green to blue depending on the temperature determined by the pixels. Thus, each pixel sequentially changes its color / temperature as a function of its relative position.
In a demonstration with humans, they observed that the “individual pixels in the imperceptible artificial skin quickly adjusted to the background environment with such precision that it appeared as if there was an empty hole in the hand,” they comment in the study.
With a material so desired by military personnel for covert operations, the researchers hope that this work “contributes to the development of next-generation soft covert military wearables.” Although the study merely serves as a proof of concept and needs to be refined, it represents a breakthrough in thermochromic materials. We are heading towards total invisibility.
Referencia: Thermally Controlled, Active Imperceptible Artificial Skin in Visible-to-Infrared RangeJinwoo Lee, Heayoun Sul, Yeongju Jung, Hyeonseok Kim, Seonggeun Han, Joonhwa Choi, Jaeho Shin, Dongkwan Kim, Jinwook Jung, Sukjoon Hong, and Seung Hwan Ko Advanced Functional Materials 2020 DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202003328
