A material is developed by scientists in China that cools without the use of electricity. Cooling of a person’s body is much more efficient than cooling an entire room or building. Clothing and textiles have been designed to do that but mostly they have disadvantages such as poor capacity, large electricity consumption, high cost, time consumption. Two colleagues Yang Si and Bing Ding have developed a personal cooling fabric that could efficiently transfer heat away from the body while also being breathable, water repellent and easy to make.
It has been made by electrospinning a polymer polyurethane, a water repelling version of the polymer and a thermally conductive filler into nanofibrous membranes. This membrane repels water from outside, but they also have large enough pores to allow sweat to evaporate from the skin and air to circulate.
This membrane could be useful not only for personal cooling, but also solar energy collection, seawater desalination and thermal management of electronic devices. When it was tested thermal conductivity was higher than that of many conventional on hi tech fabrics.
