Future clothing could be designed to enable the wearer to adapt to fluctuating temperatures without having to change their outfit.
Its makers, a team of researchers from Nankai University in Tianjin, China developed the solar-powered wearable to keep wearers’ skin at a stable temperature despite weather fluctuations.
The goal was to create an all-day, self-powered thermo regulating system that could register environmental changes and quickly respond to keep the human body within a comfortable range.
Our comfort zone for temperatures generally extends from 22° to 28°C (71.6° to 82.4°F); the new self-sustaining clothing uses sunlight to widen that window to 12.5° to 37.6°C (54.5° to 99.68°F).
Thermo regulating clothing isn’t entirely new. HeiQ Smart Temp technology, for example, has been around for over 10 years and has been incorporated by more than 50 major brands on more than 300 million garments. But it isn’t as efficient or adaptive as this design.
The Nankai researchers decided to take an active approach rather than a passive one, turning to solar energy as a power solution — linking the wearables together would make a piece of clothing.
In a warming world, the potential for a reactive clothing like this “could guarantee the safety and comfort of the human body amid fluctuating environmental temperatures and even extend human survivability in extreme environments, such as polar regions and outer space,” the researchers say in their study.
Beyond clothes, the protocol could help designers create cars and even buildings that manage internal temperatures using solar power, researchers Pengli Li and Xingyi Huang say in a related article also published in Science.
