Researchers have uncovered a new artificial skin that gives soldiers the power to disappear on the battlefield and make them undetectable for thermal imaging cameras.
A South Korean team developed a type of " cloaking skin " that uses heating and cooling activation to simulate the colors of the surrounding environment capable of switching from one to the other in just five seconds.
The wearable devices are designed in the form of patches and are made from pixelized screens that use thermal liquid crystal screens to respond quickly to the surrounding area and conceal human skin in multispectral range.
The patches are currently in the early stages, but the team told Defense One that the devices use a specialized micro camera that allows them to autonomously respond to the surrounding area.
The patches are bendable and correspond to the different bends of the skin, allowing the user to wear them as artificial skin, where the pixelized screens connect the patches, and consist of a thermoelectric (TE) unit that cools or heats by applying a reverse electric current. The units change from red and green to blue depending on the temperature determined by the pixels.
To test wearables, the team placed a patch on a human and moved it across a background of different colors and temperatures, noting that "individual pixels in imperceptible artificial skin quickly adapted to the background environment to such accuracy that looks like there is an empty hole in the hand," the study said.
For further explanation, the patches were placed on the human cheeks in the background of the bushes, and the skin area covered with the device matched the background and appeared to be an extension of the camouflaged military uniform. The team also addressed problems in which users are placed at extreme temperatures, such as the Arctic or in the desert, which may affect the device's cloaking capability.
Seung Whan Ko, of Seoul National University and head of the study told defense one, that 'the problem can be solved by adding a suitable thermal insulator, but this can also cause different performance, which means more experimentation is needed before the device is fully prepared for live combat.'
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