Since its origins, human beings have sought to protect themselves from the cold with warm clothing. Today, that is one more stage that has been overcome and what in suffocating summers like this one we would need is precisely the opposite: clothes that allow us to keep our body cool and protected from high temperatures .
To do this, researchers from Stanford University (United States) have worked on a low-cost plastic fabric that could be used to make clothes that cool the user much more efficiently than the natural or synthetic fabrics we use today. Curiously, this material is based on the transparent film that we usually use to wrap and preserve food.
To develop their cooling textile, Stanford researchers have mixed technology, photonics and chemistry. With this they have managed to provide the normal polyethylene of the transparent film that we have at home with a series of desirable characteristics in the material of clothing. For example, this variant, nanoporous polyethylene (nanoPE) , luckily for our privacy, is opaque to visible light. That is to say, it will not happen to us as in the story The Emperor’s New Clothes , by Hans Christian Andersen.
This revolutionary material makes the body release heat in two ways: the fabric cools down by allowing perspiration to evaporate through it – as other modern fabrics do – but it also provides a second cooling mechanism , since its Nanopores facilitate the heat that the body emits as infrared radiation to pass through this textile, explains Stanford University through a press release.
In this way, nanoPE allows us to lower our body temperature by almost 3 ºC , since while the cotton garments that we usually wear cause our temperature to rise 3.5 ºC, nanoPE only raises it by 0.8 ºC.
One of the study’s co-authors, Yi Cui, associate professor of Materials Sciences and Engineering and Photonic Sciences at Stanford, explains that this new family of tissues could lead to a reduction in energy consumption , since even in summers as suffocating as This year we would need to use less air conditioning at home and in the office. “If you can cool a person better than the building in which he works or lives, you will save energy,” emphasizes Yi Cui.
The study has been featured in an article published by Science.
Imagen: Yi Cui Group
