Low infrared emissivity composite materials for multi-band camouflage

Abstract

Infrared camouflage textile materials have the advantages of softness, portability, and wearability. They are the main raw materials of infrared camouflage clothing, backpacks, camouflage nets, and tents. In this paper, from the perspective of reducing infrared emissivity to achieve the purpose of camouflage, metal materials were selected as functional particles and combined with textile materials to prepare polyurethane infrared camouflage composite materials with low emissivity, whose lowest emissivity in the wavelength range of 2–22 μm can reach 0.58. On this basis, two kinds of low infrared emissivity composite materials that can be used for multi-band camouflage were developed. One is to add modified graphene into the coating to improve the conductivity of the coating and reduce the gloss of the coating, to prepare visible and infrared camouflage coated fabric. When the amount of graphene is 10% of the filler content, the coated fabric has low gloss and low emissivity at the same time. Compared with the fabric without graphene coating, the glossiness is reduced by 31%, while the infrared emissivity is only increased by 0.1. The second is to prepare composite materials with infrared camouflage and microwave absorption functions by compounding low infrared emissivity and microwave absorbing coating. The minimum infrared emissivity of the two composites was 0.76 and 0.58, respectively. In this study, a variety of materials was used to prepare low infrared emissivity fabrics with low glossiness or good microwave absorption capacity, which provided a reference for the preparation of multi-band camouflage fabrics and was expected to be applied in the field of military camouflage.