It's amazing: MIT has developed a new fabric, and a piece of clothing is ready.

MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) has developed a new fabric that can handle the temperature change of the four seasons, which is amazing!

Like our pores, it reacts to outside temperatures

If you don't care about the season, you can wear the same dress and you will no longer be the privilege of the sci-fi protagonist.

MIT's Self-Assembly Lab has recently developed a new type of material that can be applied to clothing, like the pores on our skin, which can be intelligently based on temperature. Make adjustments - when the temperature rises, the gap between the materials will become larger, and conversely, they will shrink and become smaller. ]

The porous material, called Active Auxetic, has a diamond-shaped pore that makes it look a bit like a wire mesh. It is the result of a team of MIT computer engineer Skylar Tibbits.

Tibbits led his team to develop programmable materials, as the name of the lab (self-assembly lab) suggests, and the smart materials they developed were designed according to basic programming instructions and can be commanded. Change the shape of the material so that the material can be "self-assembled."

If you have played a toy called Hoberman Ball, you may have a more intuitive understanding of this concept of self-assembly. As stated on the home page of the Self-Assembly Lab, “self-assembly is a process of ordering disordered parts. Usually, objects tend to point to only one change. But in the process of self-assembly, objects Through internal interactions, interference and organization, there will be multiple states."

This may be more or less to answer our doubts about this lab, it is not to make the material smart through intelligent terminal control. To be precise, the work done by this lab is to change the object itself from the nature of the object and let the object react to external stimuli.

The shape and material of Active Auxetic is not just the kind of barbed wire we have seen so far. After that, the Tibbits team plans to apply this concept of self-assembly to existing materials such as wood, leather and carbon fiber . It even includes the invention of new fabric materials. By changing the natural structure of the material, they are reshaped in a specific way, allowing them to react quickly to temperature, humidity, light and pressure.

Active Auxetic is not the first attempt by the Tibbits team to self-assemble materials. In 2015, they developed a self-assembling shoe that can be changed from a flat panel to a fully formed shoe.

As early as 2014, the Tibbits team developed a smart fabric that could be used in IKEA's assembled furniture. This fabric has no micro-sensors and a shiny titanium skeleton. It is actually made up of a small piece of wood. When it meets water, it folds up automatically.

According to the Tibbits team, their magical fabric will be applied in fashion design to create a “smart fashion”.

Image from: creators

“You can look at the new materials from Hussein Chalayan, Issey Miyake, or Suzanne Lee, all of which can be changed, adapted, folded, and folded,” says Skylar TIbbits. “This (Active Auxetic) will be suitable for use on clothing. I think it is a smarter fabric."