Visibly transparent multifunctional camouflage coating with efficient thermal management

Camouflage technology has attracted growing interest in many thermal applications. In particular, high-temperature infrared (IR) camouflage is crucial to the effective concealment of high-temperature objects but remains a challenging issue, as the thermal radiation of an object is proportional to the fourth power of temperature. Here, we proposed a coating to demonstrate high-temperature IR camouflage with efficient thermal management. This coating is a combination of hyperbolic metamaterial (HMM), gradient epsilon near zero (G-ENZ) material, and polymer. HMM makes the coating transparent in the visible range (300-700 nm) and highly reflective in the IR region, so it can serve as a thermal camouflage in the IR. G-ENZ and polymer support BE mode (at higher angles ∼50° to 90° in the 11-14 µm atmospheric window) and vibrational absorption band (in 5-8 µm non-atmospheric for all angles), respectively. So it is possible to achieve efficient thermal management through radiative cooling. We calculate the temperature of the object's surface, considering the emissivity characteristics of the coating for different heating temperatures. A combination of silica aerogel and coating can significantly reduce the surface temperature from 2000 K to 750 K. The proposed coating can also be used in the visible transparent radiative cooling due to high transmission in the visible, high reflection in the near-IR (NIR), and highly directional emissivity in the atmospheric window at higher angles, and can therefore potentially be used as a smart window in buildings and vehicles. Finally, we discuss one more potential future application of such a multifunctional coating in water condensation and purification.