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Technology: Smart Fabrics to Keep You Cool
We’ve been making synthetic fabrics for more than 100 years. Synthetics don’t have the best reputation, but fabrics have been engineered to be light weight, quick drying, and water proof. Rayon was the first synthetic, followed by nylon, and then in the 1970’s and 1980’s, polyester and other synthetics became very popular.
We’ve been successful at creating sub-zero fabrics that insulate well and keep the wearer warm even at very frigid temperatures. But we haven’t been as successful in designing a fabric that can keep the wearer cool. Really the best that we’ve been able to do is to use light colored fabrics which reflect visible light.
Beyond visible light though, fabric also absorbs ultraviolet, mid-infrared, and near-infrared radiation. Researchers at the Huazhong University in China designed a fabric that is thin and made of titanium dioxide and a synthetic fiber blend that an reflect UV, visible and NIR light which will cool the wearer. To the user, the fabric looks like that of a whit T-shirt and feels like cotton. It effectively acts as a mirror to reflect light across the different spectra. The cooling technique is called radioactive cooling.
Guangming Tao, optics and materials researcher, said that “this technology can be seamlessly connected with mature, modern manufacturing. Some well-known clothing brands are interested in the metafabric.” One hope is that this kind of material can reduce the need for air conditioning to offset some of the effects of global warming.
