Discovery Of Plastic Clothing Material Could Cool Your Body, Might Save Energy

The engineers from Stanford University created a plastic clothing material that is woven into clothing that could cool your body. The researchers used a sheet of polyethylene and applied a series of chemical treatments, which resulted in a cooling fabric.

The study was printed in Science. The team of researchers amalgamated chemistry, photonics and nanotechnology to make the polyethylene a cooling textile. According to Phys.Org, the cooling fabric allows the body to discharge heat in two ways, in which the wearer would feel almost 4 degrees' Fahrenheit cooler compared to wearing cotton clothing. It cools by letting perspiration evaporate through the material and allows heat that the body emits infrared radiation to pass through the plastic textile.

So, how do the team come up with a cooling fabric? The researchers found a variant of polyethylene, which is used in battery making that has a particular nanostructure that is opaque to visible light. On the other hand, it is transparent to infrared radiation, which could let body heat escape. This endowed a base material that was opaque to visible light yet thermally transparent for purposes of energy efficiency.

Then, the team modulated the industrial polyethylene by treating it with chemicals so water vapor molecules will evaporate through nanopores in the plastic. This allows the plastic to breathe like a natural fiber. This resulted in a single-sheet material that meets the three basic criteria for a cooling fabric. To make it more into a fabric-like, they developed a three-ply version, which includes two sheets of treated polyethylene separated by a cotton mesh for strength and thickness, according to Science Daily.

The researchers theorize that this study opens up new ways to cool or heat things, passively, without the use of outside energy. "If you can cool the person rather than the building where they work or live, that will save energy," said Yi Cui, an associate professor of materials science and engineering and of photon science at Stanford.