Janus outdoor protective clothing with unidirectional moisture transfer, antibacterial, and mosquito repellent properties

Abstract

Personal protective clothing with versatile and durable features is highly desirable for daily and specific environmental scenarios. Especially for outdoor workers or sports enthusiasts, prolonged outdoor exposure requires their clothing to be more functional to cope with a wide range of situations, such as heat stress in summer, odor generation after sweating, and mosquito bites. These not only reduce the wearing comfort of clothing, but also bring potential heat stroke, skin infections and diseases brought by mosquitoes. Currently, most outdoor protective clothes focus on a single function, such as waterproofing and UV protection and are not able to cope with the demand of multiple protections. In this paper, we developed permethrin-containing triblock cationic polymers (PTCPs) that can multi-functionalize outdoor clothing. Benefiting from their high affinity to polyester fibers, PTCP modified polyester yarns were obtained by an aqueous based finishing process. After that, a scalable machine-knitting fabrication technique is employed to fabricate Janus outdoor protective clothes (Janus-OPC). The as-prepared Janus-OPC exhibited excellent one-way moisture transfer properties (forward cumulative one-way transfer index (OWTI) of 924.23%, and backward OWTI of −690.52%), antimicrobial properties (97.73% and 99.72% against E. coli and S. aureus, respectively), and mosquito repellent properties (repelling rate of 76.19%). Moreover, the protective performance of the Janus-OPC was maintained after 50 times of equivalent home laundering cycles. This multifunctional protective clothing opens up a new direction for the next-generation outdoor wear.