During the last few years, I’ve been looking for new properties on top layer materials for safety surfacing as for example changing colour rubber granules using new synthetic materials.
This could add some new and creative applications with a lot of educational and play value to the current safety surfacing used at Playgrounds.
I failed to find, so far, a cost competitive and fully functional solution.
I was attending recently to an announcement of German carmaker BMW presenting new full electric cars and they talked about the introduction, past January, in the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas of a Chameleon or Octopus skin modelled colour changing paint for some of their models.
The concept car, called the BMW iX Flow, uses electronic ink technology normally found in e-readers to transform the car’s exterior into a variety of patterns in grey and white.
When stimulated by electrical signals controlled by a phone app, the material brings different pigments to the surface, causing the car to take on a different shade or design, such as racing stripes. In the future, the changes would also be controlled by a button on the car’s dashboard. No energy is needed to maintain the colour. Though the vehicle displayed at CES could only alternate between grey and white, the technology will be expanded to cover a spectrum of colour, according to BMW.
Stella Clarke, a research engineer from BMW said: “On a hot, sunny day like today, you could switch the colour white to reflect sunlight. On a cold day, you could switch it black to absorb the heat.”
Also, a couple of days ago, I saw a publication at Medium from a science writer I like to read (Vineeth Venugopal) talking about new color-changing materials on a strip that can tell us instantly if food is fresh or spoilt. They use luminogenic — molecules that make crystals glow — that are made into two concentric shells. First, the researchers synthesized a red fluorescent core hydrogel, which served as a template for the other layers. This core hydrogel was incubated in various aqueous Europium solutions, after incubating in a growth solution containing sodium alginate and responsive blue/green fluorescent polymers. Spontaneous diffusion of Europium ions from the core hydrogel into the surrounding solution triggered the formation of blue and green hydrogel layers.
This layer could easily transition from red to blue or green when triggered by changes in temperature or pH.
Soft multicolour material systems capable of emitting differently coloured fluorescence and light upon stimulation play important roles in promising applications, such as stretchable electronics, dynamic camouflaging robots, sensing, etc
To construct these colour-changing soft materials, a convenient design is to simultaneously incorporate two or more responsive luminogens (e.g., metal complexes, nanoparticles, or organic fluorophores) that can alter the overlap of their fluorescence spectra in response to external stimuli in a controllable way.
Wouldn’t be nice to formulate an EPDM or TPV or other synthetic rubber variant with these colour changing functionalities?
After seeing these examples from other entirelly different business fields I have renewed my motivation to keep searching for a feasible solution.
By the way, at CONICA we have regular meetings of an Innovation Committee, which analyses the implementation of projects for new solutions for sports flooring, for playgrounds or leisure, commercial and industrial applications.
If you have a need for a new product or a problem to solve in relation to any kind of sports, playgrounds, commercial or industrial flooring, do not hesitate to send us a message through our website or any other channel.
I have no doubt that our technical team can find a suitable solution to your request, so I might consider bringing mine.
Take care
References:
- https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/S2666-3864(21)00107-7
- Vineeth Venugopal – https://medium.com/@vinven7/a-color-changing-strip-tells-if-food-is-fresh-dbae9ba6b741
- https://indianexpress.com/article/trending/trending-globally/as-bmw-introduces-a-car-that-changes-colour-netizens-say-too-bad-for-the-cops-7711442/
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