Personal cooling technologies (PCTs) locally control the temperature of an individual instead of a whole building and are thus energy saving. However, most PCTs still consume energy and are heavy in weight, restricting their application among human beings. To achieve personal thermal comfort and no energy consumption on hot summer days, we designed a bilayer structure fabric with high thermal comfort by increasing the dissipation of human thermal radiation and reducing solar energy absorption simultaneously. The fabric consisted of two layers, including a polyethylene film with nanopores (100-1000 nm in pore size) and a film made of nylon 6 nanofibers (ca. 100 nm in diameter) with beads (ca. 230 nm in diameter), which could increase the visible light reflectance but not affect the infrared wave radiation. Therefore, the designed fabric showed a high heat dissipation power, which was 14.13, 17.93, and 17.93 W/m2 higher than that of the selected traditional textiles of cotton, linen, and odile, respectively, suggesting good cooling capability. Its cooling performance was better than those reported by the previous research works even at a higher ambient temperature. Meanwhile, the moisture penetrability and hygroscopic property results indicated that the wearing comfort of the designed fabric reached the levels of the selected traditional textiles.
Keywords: fabric; infrared transparency; nanofibre; thermal management; visible light reflection.