Personal thermal comfort thanks to a dual-mode textile

Maintaining human body temperature is one of the most basic needs for living, which often consumes a huge amount of energy to keep the ambient temperature constant. To expand the ambient temperature range while maintaining human thermal comfort, the concept of personal thermal management has been recently demonstrated in heating and cooling textiles separately through human body infrared radiation control.

Carrying out these two opposite functions within the same textile is an exciting scientific challenge. Scientists at Stanford University, California (US) have demonstrated a dual-mode textile that can perform both passive radiative heating and cooling using the same piece of textile without any energy input. The dual-mode textile is composed of a bilayer emitter embedded inside an infrared transparent nanoporous polyethylene (nanoPE) layer. They have shown that the asymmetrical characteristics of both emissivity and nanoPE thickness can result in two different heat transfer coefficients and achieve heating when the low emissivity layer is facing outside and cooling by wearing the textile inside out when the high emissivity layer is facing outside. This can expand the thermal comfort zone by 6.5 °C. Numerical fitting of the data further predicts 14.7 °C of comfort zone expansion for dual mode textiles with large emissivity contrast.

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