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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: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday September 04 2016, @03:03AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday September 04 2016, @03:03AM (#397238) Journal

    Ahhhh, but - every year, we have people killed in fires. The majority of them die due to smoke inhalation - or so the authorities would have us believe. What of the others?

    Education, in our country, sucks in many ways. But, I count out education system a failure because it fails to teach people how to survive in unexpected situations.

    Fire? No one expects to wake up in the middle of the night, with their bedroom engulfed in flames. Seriously, no one plans for it. People fail to do the right thing, again and again and again. Hide in a closet? That is a child's first response, it seems, and it happens again and again. Children should be taught how to survive a fire beginning at the earliest possible age - like preschool.

    The fact that natural fiber clothing makes a fire far more survivable than any synthetic should be common knowledge by the time kids start junior high school. It's not the 1920's anymore. My cotton clothing is wash and wear, we don't need to iron our clothing anymore. There are simply no good reasons to encourage people to dress in garments that are themselves fire hazards.

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