Continuous fabrication of polyethylene microfibrilar bundles for wearable personal thermal management fabric

Abstract

Recently, the increasing demands of energy saving and various human thermoregulation equipment give rise to the resurgence of functional fabrics. Therefore, the fibers/microfibrilar bundles with thermal management ability, which can be woven into various functional fabrics, have aroused much attention. Unfortunately, reported techniques to fabricate such functional fibers/microfibrilar bundles often suffer from the low fabrication efficiency and high cost. Herein, a highly efficient, continuous but facile approach was employed to fabricate high density polyethylene microfibrilar bundles (PMBs) containing oriented microchannels. The as-prepared PMBs can be woven into fabrics with outstanding performances (e.g., thermal insulation, breathability, hydrophobicity, etc.), showing promising application in large-area personal thermal management. That is, it can not only prevent heat loss of human body to realize passive heating in indoor circumstance, but also can insulate the sunlight radiation to avoid the excessive rise of skin temperature in outdoor circumstance. This work proposes a promising strategy to fabricate multifunctional polymer microfibrilar bundles for wearable personal thermal management fabric by using common melt processing method.