Chinese scientists design metafabric to radiate heat; keep wearer cool

A team of scientists from China has designed a smart metafabric that can cool human body down by approximately 4.8°C. Through scalable industrial textile manufacturing routes, the metafabrics exhibit mechanical strength, waterproofness and breathability for commercial clothing while maintaining efficient radiative cooling ability, as per a research paper.

Incorporating passive radiative cooling structures into personal thermal management technologies could effectively defend humans against the intensifying global climate change, according to the paper published in Science.

Scientists have shown that large scale woven metafabrics can provide high emissivity (94.5 per cent) in the atmospheric window and reflectivity (92.4 per cent) in the solar spectrum because the hierarchical-morphology design of the randomly dispersed scatterers throughout the metafabric.

Practical application tests have demonstrated that human body covered by this metafabric could be cooled down about 4.8°C lower than that covered by commercial cotton fabric.

The cost-effectiveness and high-performance of the metafabrics present great advantages for intelligent garments, smart textiles and passive radiative cooling applications, the research paper said.