Fouling‐Proof Cooling (FP‐Cool) Fabric Hybrid with Enhanced Sweat‐Elimination and Heat‐Dissipation for Personal Thermal Regulation

Abstract

AbstractPassive cooling fabric that facilitates sweat‐wicking and evaporation is highly desirable for promoting human body's thermal comfort and reducing energy consumption. However, highly hydrophilic sweat‐wicking fabric fails to repel external fouling due to the contradiction between hydrophilicity and lyophobicity. Moreover, conventional passive cooling fabrics show limited evaporation capacity when they reach the adsorption limit in intense perspiration scenarios. Herein, a fouling‐proof cooling (FP‐Cool) fabric with an interactive functional structure design for highly‐efficient personal thermal regulation is proposed by constructing spatially distributed superoleophobic Janus channels on an optimized heat conductive superomniphobic fabric. The dominant superomniphobicity and superoleophobic Janus feature endow the outer FP‐Cool fabric with durable performance (up to 3000 cycles’ abrasion) to repel oil/water‐based contaminations. The Janus channels rapidly pull sweat out of the inner fabric for efficient evaporation, ensuring a dry sense of skin. The FP‐Cool fabric preserves 40% higher thermal conductivity, and over 50% higher evaporation rate than conventional fabrics. In the sweat evaporation test, the FP‐Cool fabric shows up to 100% reduction in sweat gain ratio to cotton fabric. The concept would have implications for intelligent textiles design, and the synthesis strategy can be applied in various applications such as oil‐water separation and microfluidics control.