Could this fabric help you beat the heat?

The material stops people from overheating in hot urban areas

Spotted: July 2024 was the hottest July ever, globally, with at least ten countries recording daily temperatures of over 50 degrees Celsius in more than one location. And as cities grow, more people are vulnerable to overheating and experiencing heat-related illnesses that are likely to occur with the urban heat island effect.

Now, two molecular engineering scientists at the University of Chicago, PhD candidate Chenxi Sui and Assistant Professor Po-Chun Hsu, have created a cooling fabric designed specifically to combat this. While most cooling performance textiles reflect sunlight, in a city, heat is also radiated off buildings and sidewalks, upwards and sideways. To counteract the absorption of that thermal radiation, the team’s fabric consists of multiple layers engineered to manage different wavelengths of light.

The top layer reflects the visible solar light of the sun, while a silver nanowire middle layer rejects the invisible thermal radiation from the built environment. Finally, the bottom wool layer pulls heat away from the skin into the middle layer. As well as in textiles for clothing, the passive cooling effect of the new fabric has potential applications in everything from refrigerating food during transport to insulating and cooling buildings and cars.

Written By: Keely Khoury