Seohyun Woo, a master’s student in POSTECH’s Department of Electrical Engineering and the paper’s first author (advisor: Professor Su Seok Choi), received an Outstanding Paper Award at the International Meeting on Information Display (IMID 2025) for “Mechanochromic Fibers via Dip-Coating of Cholesteric Liquid Crystal Elastomers on Commercial Textile Cores.”

The study fabricated fibers suitable for smart textile applications using chiral liquid crystal elastomers that change color in response to mechanical deformation.

Conventional extrusion processes require high temperatures and pressures and allow only limited core materials, restricting application expansion. The team instead used dip-coating to form a uniform chiral liquid crystal elastomer shell on commercial polyurethane fibers.

Coating thickness can be precisely controlled through withdrawal speed, allowing simultaneous tuning of optical response and mechanical stiffness. This overcomes conventional processing limitations and opens applications in smart textiles, wearable displays, and optical encryption devices.

The research was supported by the Samsung Science and Technology Foundation and the Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology’s stretchable display development and stretchable technology demonstration development programs.

September 2025.