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Advanced thermal management technologies represent an important research frontier because such materials and systems show promise for enhancing personal physiological comfort and reducing building energy consumption. These technologies typically offer the advantages of excellent portability, user-friendly tunability, energy efficiency, and straightforward manufacturability, but they frequently suffer from critical challenges associated with poor breathability, inadequate wash stability, and difficult fabric integration. Within this broader context, our laboratory has previously developed heat-managing composite materials by drawing inspiration from the color-changing skin of the common squid. Herein, we describe the design, fabrication, and testing of breathable, washable, and fabric-integrated variants of our composite materials, which demonstrate state-of-the-art adaptive infrared properties and dynamic thermoregulatory functionalities. The combined findings directly advance the performance and applications scope of our bioinspired thermoregulatory composites and ultimately may guide the incorporation of desirable multifunctionality into other wearable technologies. 

Abstract Multifunctional platforms that can dynamically modulate their color and appearance have attracted attention for applications as varied as displays, signaling, camouflage, anti-counterfeiting, sensing, biomedical imaging, energy conservation, and robotics. Within this context, the development of camouflage systems with tunable spectroscopic and fluorescent properties that span the ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared spectral regions has remained exceedingly challenging because of frequently competing materials and device design requirements. Herein, we draw inspiration from the unique blue rings of theHapalochlaena lunulataoctopus for the development of deception and signaling systems that resolve these critical challenges. As the active material, our actuator-type systems incorporate a readily-prepared and easily-processable nonacene-like molecule with an ambient-atmosphere stability that exceeds the state-of-the-art for comparable acenes by orders of magnitude. Devices from this active material feature a powerful and unique combination of advantages, including straightforward benchtop fabrication, competitive baseline performance metrics, robustness during cycling with the capacity for autonomous self-repair, and multiple dynamic multispectral operating modes. When considered together, the described exciting discoveries point to new scientific and technological opportunities in the areas of functional organic materials, reconfigurable soft actuators, and adaptive photonic systems.