Supercooling fabrics could combat heat stress

The Future. As heat waves sweep across the Northern Hemisphere, global warming’s ramifications grow more severe than ever. But new fabrics capable of deflecting heat radiation from all sides could significantly lower the heat stress city-goers suffer and revolutionize cooling in other industries, too.

Coolest fit possible
A new white textile protects the wearer from several kinds of heat radiation, particularly in cities.

• The three-layer fabric uses plastic fibers and silver nanowires woven into cloth to reflect radiation from the sun and surrounding surfaces, which have different wavelengths and can only be blocked by distinct materials.
• Only a tiny amount of these special materials need to coat each cloth garment, with plastic and silver layers a hundredth the width of a human hair.
• During outdoor testing in Arizona, the fabric stayed 16 degrees (Fahrenheit) cooler than silk and 4 degrees cooler than the coolest “broadband emitter” fabrics currently used in sports.

Fabric = fridge???
With heat stress now the leading cause of climate-related death, it’s urgent that we find ways to protect people from heat in ways that don’t exacerbate the problem by releasing even more greenhouse gasses in the process — like air conditioning does, for example.

Apparently, these fabrics may be able to help with that, potentially reducing the need for food refrigeration and air conditioning if an insulating layer of fabric is wrapped around buildings or shipping containers.

That would be cool indeed.