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posted by martyb on Saturday September 03 2016, @08:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the sunlight-has-no-infrared,-right? dept.

A new polyethylene-based textile can be woven into clothing to keep people cooler:

Stanford engineers have developed a low-cost, plastic-based textile that, if woven into clothing, could cool your body far more efficiently than is possible with the natural or synthetic fabrics in clothes we wear today. Describing their work [open, DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf5471] [DX] in Science, the researchers suggest that this new family of fabrics could become the basis for garments that keep people cool in hot climates without air conditioning.

[...] This new material works by allowing the body to discharge heat in two ways that would make the wearer feel nearly 4 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than if they wore cotton clothing. The material cools by letting perspiration evaporate through the material, something ordinary fabrics already do. But the Stanford material provides a second, revolutionary cooling mechanism: allowing heat that the body emits as infrared radiation to pass through the plastic textile. [...] "Forty to 60 percent of our body heat is dissipated as infrared radiation when we are sitting in an office," said Shanhui Fan, a professor of electrical engineering who specializes in photonics, which is the study of visible and invisible light. "But until now there has been little or no research on designing the thermal radiation characteristics of textiles."

To develop their cooling textile, the Stanford researchers blended nanotechnology, photonics and chemistry to give polyethylene – the clear, clingy plastic we use as kitchen wrap – a number of characteristics desirable in clothing material: It allows thermal radiation, air and water vapor to pass right through, and it is opaque to visible light. The easiest attribute was allowing infrared radiation to pass through the material, because this is a characteristic of ordinary polyethylene food wrap. Of course, kitchen plastic is impervious to water and is see-through as well, rendering it useless as clothing.

Wait, being impervious to water and see-through renders it useless as clothing?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @09:24AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @09:24AM (#396968)

    Well then replicating woven metallic blankets for Bajoran refugees makes perfect sense.