Smart textiles: an overview of recent progress on chromic textiles

Abstract

The development of smart textiles with various ‘self-functioning’ capabilities has been opened up increasingly with possibilities of innovative and technological applications. Chromic textiles are perceived as a way to add features into common textiles. The present work aims to present and discuss the overall usability of chromic textiles by reviewing recent developments which have been done in order to straighten the path for future researches in this field. A comprehensive overview of the recent progress of smart chromic textiles based on the available state of the art is shown. Issues such as the applications, experimental verification, performance characterization, main challenges, and future research directions of chromic textiles are discussed. Recent works of photo-, thermo-, electro-, halo-, solvato-, and ionochromic textiles are reported in the literature. Despite the great technological evolution until this moment, there is still too much to be explored and discovered in the field of chromic textiles.