Toronto – With this garment, you may no longer need air conditioning. US researchers say have created a textile plastic-based market to better withstand the heat.
According to the inventors, this breakthrough, published Thursday, September 1 in the journal Science , should enable people living in hot countries remain more cool without air conditioning.
“If we can refresh people rather than the buildings where they live and work, we could make energy savings,” says Yi Cui , assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University in California.
Refresh 2
This new material result of the marriage of nanotechnology, optics and chemistry, allows the heat discharging body. According to scientists, the body can cool off and two degrees Celsius more than if he wore a cotton garment.
Such as cotton or linen, this new material allows evaporation of sweat. But it is also equipped with a unique mechanism that lets the infrared radiation emitted by the body.
All objects, including our body, reject heat in the form of invisible light waves.
The blankets keep us warm by trapping the heat emissions. It is these thermal radiation that make us visible in the dark with night vision goggles.
infrared radiation
“Between 40 to 60% of body heat is dissipated in the form of infrared radiation when we sit in the office,” says Shanhui Fan, professor of electrical engineering and one of the co-authors.
He said “very few studies, if any, had been conducted previously to design a textile favoring the dissipation of infrared radiation.”
To test the ability to refresh this experimental tissue compared with a cotton cloth of the same thickness, the researchers placed a small piece of the fabric over an area having the same temperature as the skin and measured the amount of heat retained by each some samples.
According Shanhui Fan, this study opens up new ways to cool or heat objects without the use of external energy sources.