New Clothes Material Keeps You Cool in Even the Hottest of Weather
Scientists at Stanford University have been working on a project that involves finding a material that can be used in clothing and has the ability to cool the body down in hot temperatures.
Scientists at Stanford University have been working on a project that involves finding a material that can be used in clothing and has the ability to cool the body down in hot temperatures. Unlike other cooling devices that are currently used in clothes like wearable fans and wicking fabrics, this material employs a different technique to cool the body through the use of infrared radiation.
Traditional fabrics tend to trap the heat in, but this new material will work the exact opposite and lets the heat escape, cooling down the body in the process. This could potentially be a huge breakthrough for the clothing industry. I mean who wouldn’t want to own a top that could essentially work as well as an air conditioner?
Yi Cui, a materials scientist at Stanford University, found one material that allowed infrared radiation to pass through it, and that was transparent only to infrared wavelengths and would be perfect for the task at hand. This material is currently used in lithium-ion batteries and is called nanoporous polyethylene (nanoPE) and is a thin, wrap-like plastic that would do just the job. This material blocks visible light to make it appear white to human eyes.
The pores that are speckled throughout the fabric are able to scatter the visible light as they are both of similar size and wavelength. Because the infrared light emitted by the body has a much larger wavelength, the pores are unable to stop it getting through. During the research, tests were carried out that involved laying the nanoPE on a hot plate that was the same temperature as human skin. NanoPE marginally raised the skin temperature by less than 1 degree Celsius, whereas cotton rose the temperature by over 3 degrees Celsius. The team will continue with their studies and are hoping that within the next five years some people will begin wearing it and within ten years, we all will!
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Daniel Okafor
Daniel Okafor is the Senior AI Reporter at TrendinTech, where he covers large language models, machine learning research and the practical use of artificial intelligence across business and government. He previously reported on artificial intelligence for MIT Technology Review, covering the labs behind the current generation of frontier models and the policy debates in Washington and Brussels. Daniel holds a Master of Science in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University and follows the research community closely, attending NeurIPS and ICML each year to speak with the people behind the papers. He has a particular interest in evaluation: how models are benchmarked, where those benchmarks fail and what that means for the companies betting on them.
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