Scientists have invented a fire-detecting wallpaper made of materials found in bone, teeth and hormones that sounds an alarm when it senses heat and flames.
Most of the wallpaper you can buy in the shops today is made of highly-flammable materials such as plant cellulose fibers or synthetic polymers, which results in it spreading the fire instead of preventing it.
But the scientists at the Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, swapped those ingredients out for something altogether more strange and also more environmentally-friendly.
Their revolutionary new wallpaper is based on hydroxyapatite (a brittle material found in bone and teeth) that’s fashioned into ultralong nanowires to give it a high flexibility.
The results, as detailed in a paper published in ACS Nano, can actually help in preventing the spread of flames.
But the researchers didn’t stop there.
To make the wallpaper “smart” they added thermosensitive sensors made from drops of a graphene oxide ink mixture.
At room temperature, the ink works as an electrical insulator, blocking the flow of electricity.
But when you add heat to the mix, it rapidly becomes conductive, completing a circuit that sounds an alarm in response to a fire in about two seconds.
It also boasts a prolonged alarm that can last for over five minutes.
“Compared with flammable commercial wallpaper, the fire-resistant wallpaper is superior owing to its excellent non-flammability, high-temperature resistance and automatic fire alarm function,” lead researcher Ying-Jie Zhu told Phys.org.
“The fire-resistant wallpaper has a white color, mechanical robustness and high flexibility, it can be processed into various shapes, dyed with different colors and printed with a commercial printer.
“Therefore, the fire alarm fire-resistant wallpaper has promising applications in high-safety interior decoration to save human lives and reduce the loss of property in a fire disaster.”
But it isn’t ready for your living room just yet.
It turns out those hydroxyapatite nanowires aren’t cost-effective to manufacture en masse, meaning right now the wallpaper would carry a price tag that most can’t afford.
Figuring out how to ramp up the scale of the nanowires will be the next step for researchers, along with testing other applications for their new fire-resistant material.