A cloth that changes colour when oxygen levels drop has been developed by scientists in China. The cloth could be used to make clothes that monitor oxygen levels for miners, high altitude adventurers and space explorers.
Xi Chen and colleagues at Xiamen University combined the chameleon cloth with a digital camera to capture real-time images, giving a quick readout of oxygen levels. Locating an oxygen deficiency to prevent danger is very important, says Chen. ‘When I saw on television that coal miners were trapped in mines and died because of a lack of oxygen, I felt sad and tried to figure out a simple method to detect oxygen.’
The dyes in the chameleon cloth are excited under UV light and emit in the visible region, which is captured on a digital camera.
The picture shows the colours at different oxygen concentrations
The team made the detector by coating oxygen-sensitive polystyrene microparticles onto cotton thread and embroidering the thread into a piece of cloth. First, the microparticles were loaded with a blue hydrophobic stilbene reference dye and an oxygen-sensitive red dye. ‘The biggest challenge was selecting suitable dyes,’ says Chen. The dyes had to be hydrophobic, photostable, non-toxic (or have low toxicity) and not leak after encapsulation, he adds. Interested to know more? Read the full article in Chemistry World here…
Chameleon clothes for quantitative oxygen imaging
Xu-dong Wang, Ting-yao Zhou, Xin-hong Song, Yaqi Jiang, Chaoyong James Yang and Xi Chen
J. Mater. Chem., 2011, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/C1JM14162G
