Adaptable Material Exhibits Promise for Incorporation in Textiles for Heating and Cooling Purposes
NC State University researchers have made a groundbreaking discovery that could revolutionize the clothing industry, developing a super-smart fabric that can regulate your body temperature. This innovative fabric, made from a film of tiny carbon nanotubes (CNT), has a unique combination of thermal, electrical, and physical properties that make it an ideal candidate for next-generation smart fabrics.
According to co-corresponding author Tushar Ghosh, this material is non-toxic, inexpensive, and efficient at heating and cooling, making it a potentially more affordable thermoelectric material that could be used directly against the skin.
The research team was able to optimize the thermal and electrical properties of the material, ensuring these desirable traits remained even when exposed to air for multiple weeks. Moreover, these properties were achieved using processes that were relatively simple and did not require excessively high temperatures.
Regulating Your Body Temperature
The material can cool the wearer by allowing heat to be drawn away from the body when an external source of current is applied. Imagine a film with cooling properties on one side and heating on the other, ready to adapt to your body's needs!
Kony Chatterjee, the first author of the study and a Ph.D. student at NC State, envisions integrating this material directly into the fabric itself to create a smarter and more efficient thermoregulating clothing.
In-plane Thermoelectric Properties
Researchers measured the material's ability to conduct electricity, as well as its thermal conductivity, or how easily heat passes through the material. They were able to accurately measure the material's thermal conductivity using a special experimental design to measure it in the direction that the electric current moves within the material.
A significant finding was that the material had relatively low thermal conductivity—meaning heat wouldn't travel back to the wearer easily after leaving the body to cool it. This also means that when used to warm the wearer, the heat would travel with the current toward the body, and not pass back out to the atmosphere.
A Bright Future for Smart Fabrics
The vision for this project is to design a smart fabric that can heat and cool the wearer, along with energy harvesting. Researchers believe that a smart garment could help reduce energy consumption by focusing on heating or cooling the personal space around the body rather than an entire dwelling or space, ultimately saving a tremendous amount of energy.
The paper, titled "In-plane Thermoelectric Properties of Flexible and Room Temperature Processable Doped Carbon Nanotube Films," was published in the journal ACS Applied Energy Materials. This remarkable development in the field of advanced materials represents a significant leap towards creating a more comfortable, energy-efficient, and tech-savvy world.
[References]
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- Baughman, R. H., et al. (2017). Outlook Composite materials for sustainable aerospace applications. Composites: Part B, 124, 142-154.
- Li, J., et al. (2019). Nanocomposite Materials with Nano-TiO2/CNTs: Opportunities and Challenges for Smart Textiles with UV-Shielding and Antibacterial Properties. Materials, 12(8), 1305.
- Kudo, H., et al. (2010). Lightweight, flexible, and multifunctional carbon nanotube/polymer composites for wearable electronics. Journal of Materials Chemistry, 20(39), 7854-7860.
- The discovery by NC State University researchers could revolutionize the news in the clothing industry, as they developed a smart fabric that can regulate your body temperature, thanks to materials like carbon nanotubes (CNT).
- The unique combination of thermal, electrical, and physical properties of the material make it an ideal candidate for design of next-generation smart textiles, which could lead to innovation in engineering and science, as well as technology.
- According to Tushar Ghosh, this non-toxic and inexpensive material is efficient at heating and cooling, making it a potentially more affordable thermoelectric material that could be used directly against the skin.
- Kony Chatterjee, the first author of the study, envisions integrating this material directly into the fabric itself to create a smarter and more efficient thermoregulating clothing, with the long-term vision of designing a smart fabric that can heat and cool the wearer and even harvest energy.
