"Artificial Skin" May One Day Make Troops Invisible

From Patrick Tucker's 12-5-20 DEFENSE ONE article entitled "'Artificial Skin' May One Day Make Troops Invisible, Even to Heat Sensors":

Recent advances in metamaterials and “soft” devices have enabled research prototypes that give their wearers something of a chameleon’s ability to blend into the surroundings — in the visible-light spectrum, anyway. Now new research out of South Korea promises to help troops cloak their heat signatures as well.

A new research paper out of South Korea details a new cloaking “skin” composed of bendable patches that use active heating and cooling to mimic either visible colors or thermal characteristics of the environment. They can switch from one to the other in about five seconds — allowing the wearer to camouflage themselves in the daytime and barely show up on thermal cameras at night.

These patches are built up of “pixels” containing thermochromic liquid crystals that change color depending on temperature, “thus allowing the generation of a diverse number of colors by controlling temperature. The cloaking in the visible range is therefore achieved separately by matching the ambient color,” says the paper, produced by a team led by Seung Hwan Ko at Seoul National University.

To read the entire article, click HERE.