Microfluidic-Blow-Spinning fabricated sandwiched structural fabrics for All-Season personal thermal management

Abstract

The concept of personal thermal management (PTM) has successfully been proven in heating and cooling fabrics, which can not only improve human comfort, but also reduce energy consumption. However, it remains a huge challenge to integrate the two opposite functions of heating and cooling in the same fabric by adaptive thermal management. Herein, a sandwiched structural fabric featuring both passive reflection cooling derived from photonic crystals (PCs) layer and active heating rooted in nano-Ag layer are generated by adjusting photonic band gap position and applied voltage changes. The passive reflection cooling of sandwiched structural fabric offers improved effect over the normal cotton, and the high absolute temperature difference reaches 7.9 °C. Besides, when a low voltage of 3 V is applied, the extra heating temperature difference of Joule heating realizes 18.1 °C due to the good electrical conductivity of nano-Ag. Moreover, we have successfully constructed a wearable PTM device to adjust temperature of human body by using this sandwiched structural fabric with excellent flexibility, breathability and high mechanical strength. Therefore, this strategy presents an easy-to-manipulate platform for the fabrication of sandwiched structural fabrics and provides new insights for PTM applications.