Smart materials
What are smart materials?
A so-called "intelligent" material (pigment, ink, paint, coating...) is capable of spontaneously changing its physical properties (notably its shape, chemical structure, viscosity, color...) in response to natural or provoked excitation. These can come from outside or inside the smart materials: temperature variations, mechanical constraints, electric, piezoelectric or magnetic fields.
This generation smart pigments and dyes is opposed to conventional materials, which are inert by definition, and whose properties always remain the same regardless of the stresses to which the material is subjected.
An smart product is therefore able to adapt its response, to signal a change in the environment and, in some cases, to take corrective action. It can behave like a sensor (detect signals), an actuator (perform an action on its environment) or sometimes like a processor (process, compare, store information).
The example of X-chrome materials
One of the most important families of smart products is the X-chrome materials. These smart materials have the ability to change color under the effect of an external excitation: temperature, light, pressure, humidity, etc.. Depending on the disturbance, we talk about thermochromic, photochromic, piezochromic, chemochromic materials...
Such a generation of smart materials completely disrupts our reference points. Our surrounding world is now made of a single color. With X-Chromes, with smart materials, we can access chemical structures that change color. it is a true intelligence of colors that is offered to us.
The color of these materials becomes "adaptive/interactive" with reversible, irreversible or memory effect properties. It is thus possible to detect by a simple change of color structural weaknesses in the coating of an aircraft, a temperature threshold exceeded to signal the risk of burning...
Some applications of smart materials
The list of smart materials is growing, as is the field of applications in industry, housing, medicine, biology and leisure. This is a real revolution on the scale of materials that will rapidly change our daily lives.
Some smart materials are, for example, sensitive to glucose for controlled release of insulin, or to electric or magnetic fields for drug delivery.
In the field of building and energy improvement, certain ionic polymers make it possible to make the glazing of a smart window. The material is able to be opaque or transparent in a few seconds for better light management in a building.
With smart textiles, clothes are becoming more and more active, and take care of us. Built-in sensors record our heart and breathing rhythms, LEDs integrated into a blanket cure jaundice in newborns, thermosensitive tablets change color according to temperature or UV exposure and prevent heat stroke...
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