Flexible thermochromic fabrics enabling dynamic colored display

Fibrous devices have attracted more and more research due to their unique one-dimensional morphological advantages such as flexibility, light weight and wearability.

In the past decade, a variety of functional fibrous devices have been developed, including conductive, energy harvesting and memory devices, sensors, actuators and lighting devices. Among them, color-changing fibers provide a new direction for the research of new contemporary information display and human-computer interaction due to their extensibility and programmability.

When the clothes people wear can change color and pattern instantly with the signal of external environment, it can not only enrich the aesthetics of the clothes themselves, but also establish the bridge of natural interaction between users and environment, and realize the timely display and perception of environmental information.

Researchers led by Prof. Guangming Tao at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), China have been dedicated to research in the field of functional fibers. Prof. Tao's team has proposed a wet spinning process that can produce a variety of color reversible thermochromic fibers on a large scale, and its excellent mechanical properties and weaveability can be used to produce colorful fabric displays in everyday clothing.

To demonstrate the application of these fibers, dynamic colored display fabric with QR code was prepared and the color-changeable QR code was successfully recognized, which may find application in social contact, information security, identification, shopping and electronic payment. It will provide more possibilities for the Internet of Things and wearable human-computer interaction interface. The work was published in Frontiers of Optoelectronics.