Wearing a display on your body: The black technology in woven fabrics is so cool!

"Luo Ji spent 185 years in a dream. When he woke up again, he found that the clothes worn by humans could form different colors and patterns according to the wearer's mood. The clothes of the people he met along the way were all printed with gorgeous patterns of different styles..." This is the world described in Liu Cixin's science fiction novel "The Three-Body Problem" nearly 200 years later. Although the scenes in the novel are imagined by the author, according to a recent report, this magical clothing that can be used as a display may not be far away from us.

A research team led by Professor Peng Huisheng of the Department of Polymer Science at Fudan University has developed a luminous display fabric. This fabric is composed of two types of fibers, one is a composite fiber containing luminescent materials, and the other is a transparent gel fiber that can conduct electricity. When the two fibers touch each other, light will be emitted at the contact position. Because there are countless interweaving points in the process of weaving these two materials, the woven fabric has many controllable luminous points. At present, using industrial weaving equipment, a display fabric with a length of 6 meters, a width of 0.25 meters, and about 500,000 luminous points can be woven, which can initially meet the resolution requirements of some practical applications.

Next, the research team will continue to work hard to try to make the resolution of this woven display higher and the performance more stable so that they can have more applications in the future.

Wearable "display" (Photo courtesy of Fudan University)

It sounds amazing to make displays into woven fabrics. But if we weave them into clothes, we have to consider a practical problem: what if the clothes get dirty? You know, traditional displays cannot be rubbed and are afraid of water. Can this display fabric be washed? No problem.

According to the research team, in order to make the display fabric adapt to changes in the external environment, they used highly elastic conductive fibers during the weaving process. This fiber can still work stably for one or two thousand hours under repeated friction, bending, stretching and other external forces, and can withstand hundreds of washings in the washing machine. Not only that, the fibers used for weaving are ultra-fine and ultra-soft. Clothes made of them can fit the contours of the human body and have the characteristics of being light, thin and breathable. The overall performance is not inferior to normal clothes.

If this kind of woven fabric is widely used in clothing production in the future, I am afraid that traditional clothing and displays will face the crisis of "unemployment".

In addition to display fabrics, the research team also used the same method to develop photovoltaic fabrics, energy storage fabrics and touch sensing fabrics. If they "cooperate" with display fabrics, it is possible to obtain multifunctional fabrics that integrate storage, sensing, display and other functions.

Of course, the research team did not develop such an excellent fabric to "throw all traditional clothes and displays on the beach". The research team has higher expectations for this multifunctional fabric. For example, in field work such as polar scientific research and geological exploration, scientific research personnel wearing clothes made of this multifunctional fabric can get real-time information about their location by simply tapping their clothes with their fingers a few times; letting the words typed on the mobile phone be directly displayed on the clothes may be a good way of communication for people with language barriers; designing a favorite logo on the clothes, shining at night, may help you attract a lot of envious eyes... I believe that if this fabric can be widely used, it will definitely bring us a lot of surprises.

If you want to display information on clothes, in addition to display fabrics, you can also use flexible displays. As early as 2014, my country's Royole Technology Company developed a color fully flexible display with a thickness of only 0.01 mm and a minimum curling radius of 1 mm. Unlike traditional displays, this display has the characteristics of lightness, thinness, and flexibility, and can be well embedded in clothing. Users can display pictures, videos, etc. on the display screen through their mobile phones. When clothes need to be washed, just remove the display screen from the clothes.

After looking at these materials full of "black technology", you will find that some items that exist in people's imaginations and belong to the future world are actually not far away from us. The rapid development of technology and the hard work of scientific researchers will surely make our future more exciting than we imagined.

Fabric that can "heal" itself

The rapid development of science and technology has brought many surprises to our lives. In addition to the woven fabric that can serve as a display introduced above, there are many other high-tech materials that make our eyes light up, and they feel as if they have traveled from the future world in a time machine.

In our lives, it is annoying when clothes are accidentally scratched, especially when they are newly bought. It is not good to leave the holes alone, and mending them will ruin the appearance of the clothes. It is really hard to know what to do. A material called NanoCure Tech developed by the University of Pennsylvania can solve this problem. This is a new high-tech nano-repair material with high viscosity, high elasticity and buffering properties. This material has good waterproof and ductile properties and can also conduct electricity. Of course, what people pay most attention to is that the clothes made of this material have automatic repair functions. In the demonstration, people used nails to poke a few holes in the clothes, and the holes disappeared just by rubbing the clothes with their hands a few times. Isn't it amazing? Of course, this is not a magic trick, but the real ability of this material itself. If we can wear such magical clothes, we will never have to worry about small holes in our clothes again!