Designing Textile Architectures for High Energy-Efficiency Human Body Sweat- and Cooling-Management

Abstract

Thermal management of textiles requires local microclimate control over heat and wet dissipation to create a comfortable thermal-wet environment at the interface of the human body and clothing. Herein, we design a fabric capable of both sweatand cooling-management using a knitted fabric featuring a bilayer structure consisting of hydrophobic polyethylene terephthalate and hydrophilic cellulose fibers to simultaneously achieve high infrared (IR) transmittance and good thermal-wet comfort. The IR transmission of this cooling textile increased by ~ twofold in the dry state and ~ eightfold in the wet state compared to conventional cotton fabric. When the porosity changes from 10 to 47% with the comparison of conventional cotton fabric and our cooling textile, the heat flux is increased from 74.4 to 152.3 W/cm 2. The cooling effect of the cooling fabric is 105% greater than that of commercial cotton fabric, which displays a better thermal management capacity for personal cooling. This bilayer design controls fast moisture transfer from inside out and provides thermal management, demonstrating high impact not only for garments, but also for other systems requiring heat regulation, such as buildings, which could mitigate energy demand and ultimately contribute to the relief of global energy and climate issues.

Nanofibril Organization in Silk Fiber as Inspiration for Ductile and Damage-Tolerant Fiber Design

“…Rapid crack propagation is observed orientation usually contribute a unique combination of high tensile strength and extensibility; 3D helicoidally stacking produces high resist fracture efficiently through energy dissipation and prohibit crack propagation. Thus, further research is desired to take advantage of natural materials to achieve superior artificial fiber materials [33][34][35][36]. Finally, some functional fiber devices, such as fiber sensor and conformal or deformable smart textiles, require the fiber with high flexibility and fracture resistance rather than the high mechanical strength or modulus.…”

Emerging Materials and Strategies for Personal Thermal Management

“…Such moisture-driven dynamic textile can help promote PTM with broader and flexible application scenarios. [31,110,111]…”

“…Therefore, it is natural to develop the sweatmanagement textiles with modified wettability on both sides of the textiles to enhance directional sweat wicking and evaporation for personal cooling. [20,30,31,34] This is not an easy task until the Janus membrane technologies emerge recently for liquid directional transport due to the asymmetric wettability. Based on this Janus configuration, people can make the inner side of the textiles hydrophobic while the outer side hydrophilic to enhance the sweat transport from the skin to the outside for dry skin and better evaporation.…”

Functionalization of polymers and nanomaterials for water treatment, food packaging, textile and biomedical applications: a review

“…Providing the thermal comfort is one of the most important features for clothing, especially in hot summer days, which could be provided by cooperation between personal cooling and textiles. In other words, designing a cooling garment is an affordable method for cooling management instead of using air conditioners with high energy consumption (Fu et al 2019). These are breathable materials with air permeability property, which are designed based on three principles: (1) applying thermo-responsive polymers with the ability of sensing and reacting to the environmental temperature changes, (2) using materials and structures which can transfer the body thermal radiation and (3) incorporating materials with light reflection property (Baji et al 2020).…”