Recently, the research team led by AcademicianYujian Yong and Professor Qin Xiaohong made significant progress in the field of micro and nanofibers electrospun fabric passive radiant heating. Their relevant outcomes were published in Chemical Engineering Journal under the title of“Tailoring body Surface infrared radiation behavior through colored nanofibers for efficient passive radiative heating textiles”, alliliated with Donghua University. The first author of the thesis is Li Xiangshun, a doctoral student of Collegeof Textile.The corresponding authors are Prof. Qin Xiaohong and Distinguished ResearcherJi Dongxiao .
Figure 1.
(a) Schematic diagram of the manufacturing process of NanoPAN/Ag passive radiant heating textiles.
(b) Personal thermal management mechanism for cotton textiles and NanoPAN/Ag textiles.
Figure 2.
(a) Schematic diagram of thermal measurement using a solar simulator.
(b) Radiation temperature and heat storage ability of measured textile under outdoor conditions.
(c) Measured textile radiation temperature and heat storage capacity under indoor conditions.
(d) Comparison of the thickness of NanoPAN/Ag fabric and cotton fabric.
(e) Thermal imaging of exposed human skin and theskin covered with colored NanoPAN/Ag textiles and cotton fabrics respectively.
Maintaining body temperature is the basic requirement tosustain thefunctioning of human body. The development of energy-efficient andprecise heating materials is of great significance to alleviate the energy crisis and climate change. Infrared (IR)thermal radiation is the most dominant form causing heat lossof human body. Traditional textiles have high IR emissivity. For example, cotton inevitably radiates over 50% of the human body's heat in the form of Mid-IR. Passive radiant heating fabrics can reduce the loss of infrared heat radiation by controlling the infrared emissivity of the fabric, and realize net zero passive radiant heating of the human body by further enhancing the infrared reflectivity of the body. Nevertheless, due to the uncontrollable factors such as outdoor environment and temperature, the heating mode of single passive radiant cannot meet the heating needs of the human body in a complex environment.
The research team has constructed a colored nanofiber/silver (NanoPAN/Ag) passive radiant heating fabric with adjustable color depth through electrostatic spinning-solvent impregnation-coating composite technology. The team revealed the low infrared emissivity rateof micro-nano fibers and improved the infrared reflectivity of passive radiant heating textile through silver coating. The optimized colored NanoPAN/Ag passive radiant heating textile has 15% oflow mid-infrared emissivity and 80% ofhigh mid-infrared reflectivity, while realizing a high utilization rate ofsolar energy up to 50%, presented excellent infrared heating performance. In addition, the comfortable wearability of NanoPAN/Ag textiles is also given by the use of nanofibers(Fig. 1). The radiant heat results show that NanoPAN/Ag textiles can keep body temperature at 33-35℃ under a cold environment temperature of 14℃, while dyed cotton fabrics are used, the body temperature will down below 33℃. Thus, NanoPAN/Ag textiles has huge practical application potential in infrared thermal management textiles (Fig. 2) .
