While it’s easy to engineer clothing that keeps you warm, it’s far harder to come up with an outfit that can keep you cool on a scorching summer d

New ‘mirror’ fabric can cool wearers by nearly 5°C

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2021-07-09 08:30:05

While it’s easy to engineer clothing that keeps you warm, it’s far harder to come up with an outfit that can keep you cool on a scorching summer day. Now, researchers have designed a fabric that looks like an everyday T-shirt, but can cool the body by nearly 5°C. They say the technology, if mass produced, could help people around the world protect themselves against rising temperatures caused by climate change.

To make clothing that beats back the Sun, fashion designers typically use light-colored fabric, which reflects visible light. But another method reflects the Sun’s electromagnetic radiation, including ultraviolet (UV) and near-infrared (NIR) radiation. NIR warms objects that absorb it and slowly cools them as they emit it. That cooling process, however, is stymied by our atmosphere: After being emitted from an object, NIR is often absorbed by nearby water molecules, heating up the surrounding air.

To speed up the cooling process, researchers are turning to mid-infrared radiation (MIR), a type of IR with longer wavelengths. Instead of being absorbed by molecules in the surrounding air, MIR energy goes directly into space, cooling both the objects and their surroundings. This technique is known as radiative cooling, and engineers have used it over the past decade to design roofs, plastic films, wood, and ultra-white paints.

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