Heat Transfer in Directional Water Transport Fabrics

Abstract

Directional water transport fabrics can proactively transfer moisture from the body. They show great potential in making sportswear and summer clothing. While moisture transfer has been previously reported, heat transfer in directional water transport fabrics has been little reported in research literature. In this study, a directional water transport fabric was prepared using an electrospraying technique and its heat transfer properties under dry and wet states were evaluated, and compared with untreated control fabric and the one pre-treated with NaOH. All the fabric samples showed similar heat transfer features in the dry state, and the equilibrium temperature in the dry state was higher than for the wet state. Wetting considerably enhanced the thermal conductivity of the fabrics. Our studies indicate that directional water transport treatment assists in moving water toward one side of the fabric, but has little effect on thermal transfer performance. This study may be useful for development of "smart" textiles for various applications.

Directional Trans-Planar and Different In-Plane Water Transfer Properties of Composite Structured Bifacial Fabrics Modified by a Facile Three-Step Plasma Treatment

“…Recently, the ability of directional water transport in textile materials has been reported and fabrics with multi dimension liquid moisture transport properties are of great potential for technical and smart textiles. Such fabrics have a broad spectrum of end uses e.g., filters, desalination, composite and sportswear [7][8][9][10].…”