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This Active Camouflage Technology Could Change The Future Of Warfare - SlashGear:

H. G. Wells's "The Invisible Man" brought the idea of invisibility to the mainstream over a century ago. Not long after, the fascination with invisibility became a hot trope in fantasy and sci-fi stories. Scientists have also been at work, trying to materialize their invisibility dreams with tech. Virginia-based defense and aerospace company BAE Systems is yet another player in the invisibility tech race, creating a camouflage system called ADAPTIV.

BAE System's secret sauce to creating invisibility (in infrared, at least) is a cloaking device capable of hiding equipment as large as a military tank and helping them blend with natural surroundings. ADAPTIV seeks to conceal the infrared signature of objects by allowing them to copy the temperature of nearby objects. BAE Systems says its tech can make things such as military vehicles look like a harmless cow, a mound of rocks, or shrubs.

A fruit of three years of research, ADAPTIV isn't a do-it-all invisibility tech that can hide something as heavy as a rocket-raining chopper or a truck from the naked eye. Instead, the tech targets invisibility for infrared sensors, especially for "peacekeeping operations" conducted in urban and remote areas like deserts and forests.

ADAPTIV aims to counter the detection capabilities of infrared sensors in hostile scenarios. Infrared sensors are widely deployed for reliable motion detection, especially in challenging light scenarios. In addition to mapping distances, the most significant advantage of using infrared detectors is their ability to read heat signatures, especially of suspicious objects that may not be a natural part of their immediate environment.

[...] ADAPTIV isn't trying to cancel infrared observations with specialized thermal cloaking tech. Instead, it tries to trick infrared sensors by making them see a different object, like altering the thermal profile of a tank and making it look like a huge harmless rock.

That infrared sorcery is achieved using a layer of hexagonal plates that looks like a honeycomb pattern when plastered over the surface of an object that needs to be hidden from the infrared sensors of the enemy. These modules, as BAE Systems describes, can be heated or cooled quickly to adapt to the temperature of the surroundings. But the surface heating is controlled so that the covered surface area creates the infrared visage of a harmless object.

Journal Reference:
Tao Hou, Sicen Tao, Haoran Mu, et al. Invisibility concentrator based on van der Waals semiconductor α-MoO3 [open], Nanophotonics (DOI: 10.1515/nanoph-2021-0557)

Original Submission