An Adaptive and Wearable Thermal Camouflage Device

Abstract Thermal cloaking and camouflage have attracted increasing attention with the progress of infrared surveillance technologies. Previous studies have been mainly focused on emissivity manipulation or using sophisticated thermal metamaterials. However, emissivity control is only applicable for objects that are warmer than the environment and lower emissivity is usually accompanied with high reflectance of the surrounding thermal signals if they have nonuniform temperature. Metamaterial‐based thermal camouflage holds great promise but their applications on human subjects are yet to be realized. Direct temperature control represents a more desirable strategy to realize dynamically adjustable camouflage within a wide ambient temperature range, but a wearable, portable, and adjustable thermo‐regulation system that is suitable for human subjects has not been developed. This work demonstrates a wearable and adaptive infrared camouflage device responding to the background temperature change based on the thermoelectric cooling and heating effect. The flexible thermoelectric device can realize the infrared camouflage effect to effectively shield the metabolic heat from skin within a wide range of background temperature: 7 °C below and 15 °C above the ambient temperature, showing promise for a broad range of potential applications, such as security, counter‐surveillance, and adaptive heat shielding and thermal control.