Abstract
Space heating accounts for the largest energy end-use of buildings that imposes significant burden on the society. The energy wasted for heating the empty space of the entire building can be saved by passively heating the immediate environment around the human body. Here, we demonstrate a nanophotonic structure textile with tailored infrared (IR) property for passive personal heating using nanoporous metallized polyethylene. By constructing an IR-reflective layer on an IR-transparent layer with embedded nanopores, the nanoporous metallized polyethylene textile achieves a minimal IR emissivity (10.1%) on the outer surface that effectively suppresses heat radiation loss without sacrificing wearing comfort. This enables 7.1 °C decrease of the set-point compared to normal textile, greatly outperforming other radiative heating textiles by more than 3 °C. This large set-point expansion can save more than 35% of building heating energy in a cost-effective way, and ultimately contribute to the relief of global energy and climate issues.
Highlights
Space heating accounts for the largest energy end-use of buildings that imposes significant burden on the society
The passive personal thermal management strategy that provides localized thermal control of the immediate environment around the human body to mitigate the energy demand for indoor temperature regulation could offer a promising low-cost complement to efforts that focus on thermal exchange of the entire building for energy savings[5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]
Thermal measurements show that the nanoporous metallized PE textile, when laminated on the outer surface of traditional textiles rather than placed on the inside, enables 7.1 °C decrease in the set-point of ambient temperature compared to traditional cotton textile, greatly outperforming all the existing radiative heating textiles, including Ag nanowire (AgNW)-coated textile (0.9 °C), Omni-Heat (0.1 °C) and Mylar blanket (4 °C)
Summary
Space heating accounts for the largest energy end-use of buildings that imposes significant burden on the society. By constructing an IR-reflective layer on an IR-transparent layer with embedded nanopores, the nanoporous metallized polyethylene textile achieves a minimal IR emissivity (10.1%) on the outer surface that effectively suppresses heat radiation loss without sacrificing wearing comfort. This enables 7.1 °C decrease of the set-point compared to normal textile, greatly outperforming other radiative heating textiles by more than 3 °C. Our recent work demonstrated effective radiative cooling of the human body by 2 °C using IR-transparent nanoporous polyethylene (nanoPE) textile, which shows the great potential of engineering the thermal radiation properties of textiles for energy savings in buildings[5]. We believe the superior localized heating capability of this wearable nanoporous metallized PE textile could potentially bring forth significant impact on reducing global energy consumption
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