Infrared-Transparent Visible-Opaque Fabrics for Wearable Personal Thermal Management
By J. Tong, Xiaopeng Huang, Svetlana V. Boriskina, J. Loomis, Yanfei Xu, Gang Chen. 2015
341 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Personal cooling technologies locally control the temperature of an individual rather than a large space, thus providing personal thermal comfort while supplementing cooling loads in thermally regulated environments. This can lead to significant energy and cost savings. In this study, a new approach to personal cooling was developed using an infrared-transparent visible-opaque fabric (ITVOF), which provides passive cooling via the transmission of thermal radiation emitted by the human body directly to the environment. Here, we present a conceptual framework to thermally and optically design an ITVOF. Using a heat transfer model, the fabric was found to require a minimum infrared (IR) transmittance of 0.644 and a maximum IR reflectance of 0.2 to ensure thermal comfort at ambient temperatures as high as 26.1oC (79oF). To meet these requirements, an ITVOF design was developed using synthetic polymer fibers with an intrinsically low IR absorptance. These fibers were then structured to minimize IR reflection via weak Rayleigh scattering while maintaining visible opaqueness via strong Mie scattering. For a fabric composed of parallel-aligned polyethylene fibers, numerical finite element simulations predict 1 {\mu}m diameter fibers bundled into 30 {\mu}m yarns can achieve a total hemispherical IR transmittance of 0.972, which is nearly perfectly transparent to mid- and far-IR radiation. The visible wavelength properties of the ITVOF are comparable to conventional textiles ensuring opaqueness to the human eye. By providing personal cooling in a form amenable to everyday use, ITVOF-based clothing offers a simple, low-cost solution to reduce energy consumption in HVAC systems.
Subfields: Building and Construction, Civil and Structural Engineering, Environmental Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/25a4e7147ca66e24e9a5ef7c2359de7fb2c820d8
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Citations in the corpus
- Temperature Regulation in Colored Infrared-Transparent Polyethylene Textiles (2019, result): “These experimental results are in good agreement with heat-transfer modeling of the infrared cooling effect in previous works.(4,5) This cooling effect is similar to that of the previously reported undyed nanoPE,(5,9) which further confirms the effectiveness of IR-transparent pigment nanoparticles f”
- Porous Polymers with Switchable Optical Transmittance for Optical and Thermal Regulation (2019, background): “17 For thermal switching, poly(propylene) and nylon, which are appreciably transparent in the LWIR, may be used besides poly(ethylene).(4) Table S2 shows a variety of PPCs, ranging from commercially available poly(tetrafluoroethene) (PTFE) to paper sheets, which are suitable for large-scale use.”
- An ultra-thin colored textile with simultaneous solar and passive heating abilities (2019, methodology): “In order to evaluate the impact of textiles’ optical properties on personal heating in both indoor and outdoor environments, a steadystate one-dimensional heat transfer model considering heat loss (radiative loss, convective/conductive heat loss) as well as metabolic heat generation [5,16] is adopte”
- Advanced Textiles for Personal Thermal Management and Energy (2020, methodology): “These fibers were structured to minimize IR reflection via weak Rayleigh scattering while maintaining visible opaqueness via strong Mie scattering.(19) The first radiative cooling textile based on nanoporous polyethylene (NanoPE) was experimentally demonstrated by Hsu et al.”