Science Daily June 13, 2024 Urban areas have heat island effects that largely diminish the effectiveness of cooling textiles as wearable fabrics because they absorb emitted radiation from the ground and nearby buildings. A team of researchers in the US (University of Chicago, Duke University) developed a mid-infrared spectrally selective hierarchical fabric (SSHF) with emissivity greatly dominant in the atmospheric transmission window through molecular design, minimizing the net heat gain from the surroundings. The SSHF featured a high solar spectrum reflectivity of 0.97 owing to strong Mie scattering from the nano-micro hybrid fibrous structure. The SSHF was 2.3°C cooler than […]
Tag Archives: Adaptive fabrics
Scientists develop chain mail fabric that can stiffen on demand
Science Daily August 12, 2021 Structured fabrics, such as woven sheets or chain mail armours, design can target desirable characteristics, such as high impact resistance, thermal regulation, or electrical conductivity. However, the properties are usually fixed. An international team of researchers (Singapore, USA – Caltech) has developed new chain fabric that is flexible like cloth but can stiffen on demand. It comprises hollow octahedrons that interlock with each other. Increase in bending resistance arises because the interlocking particles have high tensile resistance. They found that chain mails, consisting of different non-convex granular particles, undergo a jamming phase transition that is […]