Stanford researchers have created a new plastic-based textile to fight energy consumption
Orange County, CA - September 8th 2016 - Two current issues mankind faces are energy consumption and climate change. When high amount of energy are consumed it results in excessive greenhouse gas emissions which disrupt natural climate and can cause extreme weather. Stanford engineers, to combat energy inefficiency, have developed a new textile able to discharge heat more facilely than modern cotton fabric.
The plastic-based, low-cost material could become the base of clothing, because of its ability to keep people in hot temperatures cool without the use of air conditioning. The fabric is able to do this by discharging heat in two ways; by sweat evaporating through the material, like most fabrics, or by infrared radiation (body heat) passing through the textile. This second method can reduce the wearer’s temperature by nearly 4 degrees Fahrenheit.
This innovation begins looking at personal thermal management as a way to keep comfortable rather than heating or cooling for a whole building. This means that heating or cooling for a human body and their local environment without wasting energy for the entire environment.
In an indoor environment, infrared radiative heat dissipation contributes to more than 50% of total body heat loss. The 1 to 4 degree difference the clothing makes in the wearers body temperature converts to an energy savings of 7 to 45%.
In the initial stages of their experiment, researchers started by modifying a sheet of polyethylene through chemical treatments enabling water vapor molecules to evaporate through small pores in the material. This allowed for the fabric’s consistency and behavior to mirror that of a natural fiber.
After succeeding in making the first sheet of the cooling fabric, researchers strove to give it more fabric characteristics by adding another piece of cooling fabric and separating them with cotton mesh for strength and thickness. To test if the three-ply version of the material worked, researchers compared how much heat it trapped compared to a cotton fabric of similar thickness. The results were that the polyethylene kept skin 3.6 degrees cooler than the cotton competitor.
Researchers are furthering these studies by progressing into testing factors such as performance evaluation with perspiration, wash cycles, abrasion cycles, or ultraviolet irradiance. They’re also working with qualitative features such as more colors, textures to become more cloth-like.
Co-author, Yi Cui, said, "In hindsight, some of what we've done looks very simple, but it's because few have really been looking at engineering the radiation characteristics of textiles."
