Directional water transport is a predominant part of functional textiles used for continuous sweat release in daily life. However, it has remained a great challenge to design such textiles which ensure continuous directional water transport and superior prevention of water penetration in the reverse direction. Here, a scalable strategy is reported to create trilayered fibrous membranes with progressive wettability by introducing a transfer layer, which can guide the directional water transport continuously and spontaneously, thus preventing the skin from being rewetted. The resulting trilayered fibrous membranes exhibit a high one-way transport index R (1021%) and a desired breakthrough pressure (16.1 cm H O) in the reverse direction, indicating an ultrahigh directional water transport capacity. Moreover, on the basis of water transport behavior, a plausible mechanism is proposed to provide insight into the integrative and cooperative driving forces at the interfaces of trilayered hydrophobic/transfer/superhydrophilic fibrous membranes. The successful synthesis of such fascinating materials would be valuable for the design of functional textiles with directional water transport properties for personal drying applications.

Both antigravity directional water transport and ultrafast evaporation are critical to achieving a high-performance moisture-wicking fabric. The transpiration in vascular plants possess both of these features, which is due to their optimized hierarchical structure composed of multibranching porous networks following Murray’s law. However, it remains a great challenge to simultaneously realize the ultrafast water transport and evaporation by mimicking nature’s Murray networks in the synthetic materials. Here, we report a synergistic assembly strategy to create a biomimetic micro- and nanofibrous membrane with antigravity directional water transport and quick-dry performance by combining a multibranching porous structure and surface energy gradient, overcoming previous limitations. The resulting fiber-based porous Murray membranes exhibit an ultrahigh one-way transport capability (R) of 1245%, a desired overall moisture management capability (OMMC) of 0.94, and an outstanding water evaporation rate of 0.67 g h–1 (5.8 and 2.1 times higher than the cotton fabric and Coolmax fabric, respectively). Overall, the successful synthesis of these biomimetic porous Murray membranes should serve as a source of inspiration for the development of moisture-wicking technologies, providing personal comfort in hot or humid environments.

Efficient sweat release and heat dissipation are required for functional textiles that improve comfort and productivity while being worn in daily life. However, the porous structure of textiles exhibits an opposite effect on water transport and heat transfer capacities, leading to a longstanding bottleneck for the design of multifunctional drying and cooling textiles. Here, a biomimetic transpiration textile based on the hierarchical and interconnected network of vascular plants is demonstrated for highly efficient personal drying and cooling. The transpiration-inspired design offers a textile with distinct advantages, including a desired one-way water transport index (1072%), rapid water evaporation rate (0.36 g h −1), and outstanding throughplane (0.182 W m −1 K −1) and in-plane (1.137 W m −1 K −1) thermal conductivities. Moreover, based on the optimized performance, plausible mechanisms are proposed and calculated to provide insight into the water transport and heat transfer within the hierarchical and interconnected network, which provide promising benefits to the development of multifunctional drying and cooling textiles. Overall, the successful synthesis of this biomimetic transpiration textile provides a comfortable microclimate to the human body, thus satisfying the growing demand for better health, productivity, and sustainability.

Personal cooling textiles are a promising energy-free pathway for confronting serious heat-related public health threats and improving industrial worker productivity. Current cooling strategies mainly focus on passive daytime radiation, and there is a lack of research on all-day cooling methods which utilize synergistic radiative, conductive, and evaporative heat dissipation. Herein, we demonstrate a hierarchical polyurethane/silicon nitride fibrous membrane with Janus wettability fabricated via a scalable electrospinning method followed by single-side hydrophilic plasma treatment. High angular-dependent solar reflectance (91%) and human body infrared emittance (93%) allow for a temperature drop of ∼21.9 °C under direct sunlight and ∼2.8 °C at night compared with traditional cotton. The innovative integration of Janus wettability and heat conduction in hierarchically designed textiles ensures a minimum sweat consumption of 0.5 mL h–1, avoiding harmfully excessive perspiration. The excellent all-day cooling performance of this hierarchical textile presents great advantages for smart textile, energy-saving, and personal cooling applications.

Textiles with excellent moisture transport characteristics play key role in regulating comfort of the body, and use of color in textiles helps in developing aesthetically pleasing apparels. Herein, we report an aesthetically pleasing and breathable dual-layer cellulose acetate (CA) based nanofibrous membranes with exceptional directional moisture transport performance. The outer layer was synthesized by subjecting CA nanofibers to hydrolysis and reactive dyeing processes, which converted moderately hydrophobic CA nanofibers into uniformly colored superhydrophilic CA nanofibers with an excellent wettability. In addition to excellent wettability and superhydrophilic nature, dyed CA (DCA) nanofibers also offered high color yield and dye fixation as well as considerable colorfastness performance against washing and light, thus, were used as the outer layer. However, pristine CA nanofibers were chosen as the inner layer for their moderate hydrophobicity. The subsequent CA/DCA nanofiber membrane produced a high wettability gradient, which facilitated directional moisture transport from CA to DCA layers. The resultant dual-layer nanofiber membranes offered a high color yield of 16.33 with ∼82% dye fixation, excellent accumulative one-way transport capacity (919%), remarkable overall moisture management capacity (0.89), and reasonably high water vapor transport rate (12.11 kg d m), suggesting them to be a potential substrate for fast sweat-release applications.