Smart colors

Smart colors have the ability to change colors in different temperatures, meaning when using the color grey, it’s the most grey at 38 degrees and whiteish at 45, although our experts are trying to bring it within 20 and 35. We have succeeded in producing smart micro cement and smart micro expose using aforesaid color.

In addition to their glamour and beauty, this technique is a big help to energy consumption which more on to that later.

Possible usage:

1. facade
2. Interior walls
3. Any room with changeable temperature
4. Fascinating ceiling covers
5. All decorative parts of the house

Entering smart world with smart materials

In a stable condition, substances tend to have a fixed behavior against external factors, such as temperature, pressure, electricity, magnetism and so on.

For example ST37 steel fuses at 1400 degrees Celsius and with a constraint tension of 3700 kg per square cm breaks down to reform permanently as plastic.

A brief for alloys and composites

These traits and behaviors are eternally in substances which humans have tried to improve by understanding supported materials and many studies. Basically all efforts in that matter through history, have been for the sake of material property improvements or flaw reduction. Like the aforementioned steel, used for buildings, is a kind of alloy that with changing the carbon percentage in it, they have altered some traits.

Alloying (Composition of materials in the form of microstructure and solving with each other namely chrome mixed with steel to enhance corrosion resistance) and making composites (Composition of materials in the form of macrostructure to avoid solving that leads to a new substance creation namely epoxy glass made of epoxy and glass fibers in the form of resin and fibers) were human’s first solutions to benefit from substances.

For further details on composites which are found vastly nowadays (namely sandwich panels, mesh cylinders, Lightweight structures, self-healing structures and smart ones, etc.) we could point out to one of the oldest ones known as cob! That’s right, the first material ever that human beings utilized to build their house. Cob is a composition macrostructure of straw and mud that in fact mud (clay and water) is a ceramic (perhaps the first ceramic made) that was mixed with thins straw (fibers) in order to become more resistant. We are going to wrap this up here.

The first attempts to achieve smart substances initiated 300 years BC. The time when alchemists were trying to transfer copper to gold; Although there weren’t any breakthroughs on that subject, led to changing material physical properties.

There’s no specific definition for smart substances but generally speaking: they are substances that one or more of their traits change as a result of temperature, pressure, color… or substances that transform energy within physical areas like mechanical energy to electricity (piezoelectric).

First step toward smart substances

In the past 50 years humans have gone beyond alloys and composites and went for smart ones, substances with the ability to comprehend the environment and conditions around and react to them but not necessarily physically. They are commonly used with different terms as in smart metals, smart composites, smart coatings, etc.

In other words they have got the ability to maintain a specific state or to exaggerate a little bit, they have memories which external factors stimulate to be in a specific state in a specific condition (temperature, sound, voltage, electricity, magnetism, pressure, etc).

To rephrase it they sense the conditions, analyze and then react.

Questioning laws of physics

When heating a metal, we normally expect them to expand while this may not be the case for smart substances; they could behave distinctively in various temperatures that is to say questioning classic laws of physics (except first and second law of thermodynamics).

Usage of Smart substances

They are used in plenty of fields like industry, medical, military, building, car manufacturing, etc.

One usage, take nitinol (composition of nickel and titanium) for instance, is in making frames for glasses which gives them the ability to return to the first state after deformation; another example would be optic lenses that when exposed directly to light, they change colors and become darker so as to reduce the light perceived by pupils.

As you see they are very practical in everyday life.

They are the reason for terms like smart airplanes, micro machines’ texture memory, Self-assembled structures, changeable nanostructures and so on.

Categorizing Smart substances

We can put them into two categories:

1. The ones which behave individually toward specific stimulant (temperature, pressure,…) like when exposed to high temperature their absorption ratio, reflectivity or refraction of light change.
2. These, on the other hand, have a more distinguished ability to transform energy in different physical areas; consider liquid crystals in LCDs, changing colors in existence of an electrical force, they take the credit for everything displayed on your TV or phone screen; In addition to luminescence, piezoelectric and bioelectric.

We hope this article has been a great help and informative enough in terms of smart substances.

We are definitely going to discuss more on this in whether articles or videos, so stay tuned.