New Smart Soft Suit for Adaptive Temperature and Insulation in High-Temperature Environments
TapTechNews August 14th news, as global warming intensifies, extreme high-temperature weather has an increasing impact on human life, posing great challenges to workers in outdoor and indoor high-temperature environments.
The research team led by Dr. Dahua Shou (transliterated), an associate professor in the Institute of Fashion and Textiles at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and a young scholar in advanced textile technology, has developed a new type of smart soft suit that can automatically adapt to the constantly changing environmental temperature and provide insulation and ventilation functions, effectively ensuring the safety of workers in high-temperature operations. Relevant research results have been published in the journal Advanced Science.
Maintaining a constant body temperature is one of the important conditions for human survival and work. High-temperature environments will increase the energy consumption of the human body, leading to heat stress, aggravating chronic diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, mental health problems and asthma, and also increasing the risk of infectious disease transmission. TapTechNews noted that according to World Health Organization data, from 2000 to 2019, about 489,000 people died globally each year due to high-temperature-related diseases, of which Asia accounted for 45% and Europe accounted for 36%.
In order to protect workers in high-temperature environments, such as firefighters and outdoor construction workers, heat-insulating protective clothing is essential. However, the insulation performance of traditional protective clothing is fixed, which is prone to overheating and discomfort in moderate temperature environments, and may not provide sufficient protection in extreme high-temperature environments such as fires.
The research team developed a smart soft suit to achieve adaptive temperature and insulation in a hot environment and provide excellent personal protection and thermal comfort in different temperature ranges. This research is inspired by the pigeon in nature, imitating its mechanism of regulating body temperature through the feather structure. Pigeons use their feathers to capture a layer of air around the skin to reduce heat loss to the environment. When the temperature drops, they fluff their feathers to capture a large amount of stagnant air, thereby increasing the thermal resistance and keeping warm.
The research team achieved the dynamic adaptive thermal regulation of clothing by using soft robotic textile materials. The clothing is embedded with a soft actuator in a human-body network-like exoskeleton structure, which is filled with non-toxic, non-flammable, and low-boiling-point liquid. When the environmental temperature rises, the liquid turns into gas, the actuator expands, increasing the fabric thickness and increasing the stagnant air layer, increasing the thermal resistance from 0.23 to 0.48 Km2/W, thereby enhancing the insulation performance. Even if the external temperature reaches 120°C, the inner surface temperature of the protective clothing can be at least 10°C lower than that of traditional heat-resistant clothing.
This uniq ue soft textile material made of thermoplastic polyurethane is soft, elastic and durable, more skin-friendly and comfortable than temperature-sensitive clothing embedded with shape memory alloy, and can be applied to a variety of protective clothing. The porous spacer woven structure of the soft actuator can significantly reduce convective heat transfer while maintaining high breathability.
Unlike traditional cooling methods relying on thermoelectric chips or circulating liquid cooling systems, this lightweight soft suit can achieve self-temperature regulation without energy consumption.
Dr. Shou said: Wearing heavy fire-fighting suits is very sultry. Sometimes when firefighters take off their equipment, nearly a pound of sweat can be drained from their boots. This prompts me to develop a new type of clothing that can adapt to different environmental temperatures and maintain good breathability. Our smart soft suit can seamlessly adapt to different seasons, climates, indoor and outdoor environments, helping users maintain continuous thermal comfort in high-temperature conditions.
Dr. Shou believes that this innovation has a wide range of potential applications, which can be applied to sportswear, winter clothing, medical clothing, outdoor equipment and other fields, and can also be used for building insulation and other aspects, with energy-saving potential.
In addition, Dr. Shou's team also extended the thermal adaptive concept to inflatable breathable jackets and warm clothing. This smart soft suit is suitable for low-temperature environments or sudden cooling, which can help people trapped in the wild maintain normal body temperature.