Garments Change Colour In Response To Rising Temperatures
Students of the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) Gandhinagar have taken a groundbreaking leap by incorporating thermochromic and photochromic technologies into garments.
The Textile Design (TD) course unveiled swaddling clothes, military fatigues, children’s games, and even curtains that feature these cutting-edge technologies.
Thermochromic is a fabric changing colour based on temperature technology, while photochromic is a fabric changing colour based on light technology.
It include clothes that change colour in response to temperature, helping parents monitor a baby’s fever and mobile covers that indicate device overheating.
Military fatigues now adapt to different environments through colour-changing camouflage, turning from green in temperate zones to desert yellow in scorching desert conditions.
The students also successfully engineered curtains that displayed three different colours throughout the day.
By employing pigments with both photochromic and glow-in-the-dark properties, the curtains transform from white to deep yellow during peak afternoon hours, providing additional shade.
At night, the heat absorbed during the day manifests as captivating radium prints that glow in the dark.
Avanish Kumar, an assistant professor at NIFT, explained that they used dyes with different compositions to achieve the desired results.
“The aim is to provide users with a visually intuitive and easy-to-identify cue, thus enhancing usability,” Kumar added.
While working to scale up the technology, the team is also focusing on integrating these features directly into the fabric during the manufacturing process.
