According to MIT Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Xuanhe Zhao, who joined the MIT faculty from Duke this month and holds a joint appointment with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the new material is essentially a layer of electro-active elastomer that could be quite easily adapted to standard manufacturing processes and uses readily available materials.

This could make it a more economical dynamic camouflage material than others that are assembled from individually manufactured electronic modules.

In its initial proof-of-concept demonstrations, the material can be configured to respond with changes in both texture and fluorescence, or texture and colour.

The new synthetic material is a form of elastomer, a flexible, stretchable polymer. “It changes its fluorescence and texture together, in response to a change in voltage applied to it — essentially, changing at the flip of a switch,” says Qiming Wang, an MIT postdoc and the first author of the paper.

It has been observed that cephalopods achieve their remarkable colour changes using muscles that can alter the shapes of tiny pigment sacs within the skin — for example, contracting to change a barely visible round blob of colour into a wide, flattened shape that is clearly seen. The muscle contraction also varies skin textures.

To replicate both observations, the researchers used a physical phenomenon they discovered in 2011, that applying voltage can dynamically change surface textures of elastomers.

They combined this texture change with mechanically responsive molecules embedded in the elastomer, which cause it to fluoresce or change colour in response to voltage changes. When the voltage is released, both the elastomer and the molecules return to their relaxed state.