Flexible and Robust Biomaterial Microstructured Colored Textiles for Personal Thermoregulation

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2020 Apr 22;12(16):19015-19022. doi: 10.1021/acsami.0c02300. Epub 2020 Apr 8.

Abstract

Integrating personal thermoregulation technologies into wearable textiles has enabled extensive and profound technological breakthroughs in energy savings, thermal comfort, wearable electronics, intelligent fabrics, and so forth. Nevertheless, previous studies have suffered from long-standing issues such as limited working temperature, poor comfort, and weak reliability of the textiles. Here, we demonstrate a skin-friendly personal insulation textile and a thermoregulation textile that can perform both passive heating and cooling using the same piece of textile with zero energy input. The insulation textile material is composed of biomaterial microstructured fibers that exhibit good thermal insulation, low thermal emissivity, and good dyeability. By filling these microstructure fibers with biocompatible phase-change materials and coating them with polydimethylsiloxane, the insulation textile becomes a thermoregulation textile that shows good water hydrophobicity, high mechanical robustness, and high working stability. The proposed thermoregulation textile exhibits slow heating/cooling rates with improved thermal comfort, offering feasible and adaptive options for personal cooling/heating scenarios and enabling scalable manufacturing for practical applications.

Keywords: colored fiber; microstructure fiber; personal thermoregulation; phase-change materials; robustness fiber.