Air conditioning suit

Clothing made of self-cooling fabric will reduce the cost of air conditioning

DailyTechInfo based on Stanford University materials: Stanford engineers develop a plastic clothing material that cools the skin

The fabric, created on the basis of ordinary polyethylene by researchers from Stanford University, can become a material for "cooling" clothing, which allows reducing the surface temperature of a person's body in a hot environment. And the use of such clothes, in turn, will significantly reduce the cost of air conditioning, which is of great importance for large office buildings, workshops and other industrial premises.

According to the tests carried out, clothing made of self-cooling fabric allows to lower the surface temperature of the human body by 2.2 degrees Celsius compared to the body temperature of a person dressed in cotton cloth. "With the help of such clothes, we can cool the human body instead of cooling the entire interior of the building where it is located," says Yi Cui, a professor of materials science at Stanford University.

The key to the self-cooling properties of the fabric are two physical effects that allow heat to be removed from the human body with high efficiency. The first is that the self-cooling fabric passes moisture well, removing evaporating sweat from the body. And, secondly, this fabric allows you to remove heat in the form of infrared radiation.

The researchers began the search for self-cooling fabric technology with ordinary polyethylene used for food packaging. This material is transparent to infrared radiation, but it does not pass moisture through itself. The researchers then replaced ordinary polyethylene with polyethylene used in batteries. Such a material has a porous ordered structure that makes it water-permeable, opaque to visible light and transparent to infrared radiation. Additional processing allowed to increase the diameter of the pores in polyethylene, which allows water molecules to pass through the material without hindrance.

Having obtained modified polyethylene, the researchers created a fabric consisting of two layers of polyethylene and a cotton mesh enclosed between them, which provides the fabric with the necessary strength. However, in order for such a material to be used for the production of work clothes, scientists have a lot of work to do. "If you want to start producing clothes, you will first need to establish a large–scale production of inexpensive fabric," says Yi Kui.

In addition to clothing, the new material can be used in the construction of passive cooling systems for electronics, various equipment, etc. And all this can provide significant cost and energy savings compared to traditional methods.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  07.09.2016