面向个人热管理的降温纺织品

Abstract

<p indent="0mm">Textiles play an extremely important role in various aspects of our life since prehistoric times. Toward passionate and imperceptible sport and health, people have begun to explore evolving functions beyond the basic values of textiles. Smart textiles with functions such as communication, sensing, color change, warming, cooling, actuation, and computing have become the new frontier of wearable technology. Global warming and the enormously scorching weather have adversely affected human production and living as well as the sustainable development of society. As being homothermal, the human body has the ability of automatic temperature regulation. However, people are still vulnerable to excessive heat load without the protection of buildings and traditional cooling systems. As the largest organ of the human body, the skin can sense the temperature changes of the external environment and regulate its own temperature. Human skin heat dissipation is a complex process including heat convection, heat evaporation and heat radiation. As the boundary between human skin and the external environment, textiles play an important part for the human body to attain thermal comfort under different environmental conditions. Therefore, personal thermal management, a technology regulating the microenvironments around the human body, can effectively control the heat exchange of the human body, and thus become an eco-friendly solution. With the progress of thermal and materials science, diverse cooling textiles have provided people with convenience and safety in the fields of medicine, firefighting, aerospace, and military technology. In the perspective of cooling principles, personal thermal management solutions based on textiles are categorized as UV-protective textiles, cooling textiles, active cooling suits, and radiative cooling textiles. Some of them have been utilized to maintain a relatively stable body temperature in different scenarios. Textile applications at present are no longer confined to social intercourse and aesthetics, but are more focused on functional breakthroughs. The urgency of global warming and the danger of outdoor work in special occupations have greatly increased the demand for innovations in cooling textiles. It is crucial to maintain thermal comfort of individuals for physical and mental health in extreme environments. Although certain cooling textiles have been commercialized and become basic essentials for specific occasions, stringent challenges remain for weakening the perception of cooling textiles during utilization, expanding their application scenarios to make them available life-essentials. This review focuses on the regulation mechanism and development of various cooling textiles for personal thermal management. We summarize recent research progress and its significance in energy saving and emission reduction. We also propose solutions toward related challenges in the research and development of high-performance protective textiles, and finally give a perspective to the rise of cooling protective textiles. Through multidisciplinary innovations in textile engineering, materials science, optics, thermal science, and mechanics, cooling textiles can be yielded in a low-cost way with multi-functional performance, while maintaining superior wearability and durability compatible with our daily activities. Cooling textiles would enable the construction of more effective, more comprehensive, and more subtle cooling systems for people. In the perspective of intelligent sport and health, the combination of cooling textiles with flexible electronics and digital twins technology can further enable common-looked textiles with intelligence such as autonomous thermal regulation, perception and interaction, thermoelectrical self-powering, short-haul communication, and metaverse.