British clothing company Vollebak has announced that it has developed a prototype stealth jacket in collaboration with scientists. It has graphene elements and is able to make the wearer invisible in the infrared.

“Our core mission is to design clothes for the next century,” said Vollebak co-founder Steve Tidball.

In 2018, Vollebak started designing graphene jackets. In 2019, Tidball arranged to work with Koskun Kokabas, a professor in the Department of Materials for 2D Devices at the University of Manchester, who co-authored a paper on the use of graphene for thermal camouflage.

As a result, the developers created a jacket with a coating of 42 "graphene sections", consisting of hundreds of layers of graphene several atoms thick. Gold and copper wires connect them to a microcomputer that programs these areas to emit varying levels of heat radiation without actually raising the temperature. Each such section can be programmed individually. The change in thermal radiation allows the site to match the ambient temperature. In this way, the infrared camera can be fooled. You can also play Snake and Tetris on the jacket.

Tidball explains that there are no plans to produce these jackets anytime soon, and the prototype was a proof of concept.

Previously, scientists from the University of Manchester have already presented a smart adaptive tissue that can reduce the temperature of the human body. They also exploited the optical properties of graphene.

Meanwhile, scientists from the Department of Chemistry and the Center for Nano- and Micromechanics at Tsinghua University in Beijing have proposed a new way to enrich silk fiber using carbon nanotubes and graphene. They sprayed a suspension of single-walled nanotubes and graphene onto mulberry leaves, which feed on silkworms. Such a diet led to the production of silk thread with improved properties in a natural way.

bbabo.Net