The principal purpose of clothing has been to protect the wearer from the cold, which explains how better personal insulation helps most of the Western world save on winter heating. But another large cost that the modern world faces, and one that would grow with global warming, is keeping the environment cool in warm weather. Clothing that does the opposite of insulating our bodies may be a way to economise on how cool we need the surroundings to be.

Po-Chun Hsu, Alex Y Song, Peter B Catrysse, Chong Liu, Yucan Peng, Jin Xie,  Shanhui  Fan and Yi Cui from  the Departments of Material Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Stanford and the Linear Accelerator facility at Stanford report in the journal Science that they have  developed a material that does just that.

The way woolen or other fabrics help us keep body heat in is by being poor conductors of heat and impervious to winds. Insulating materials work by trapping pockets of air whose dimensions are nearly the same or less than the average distance that one molecule in the air moves before it encounters another. The thinner the fibres of the material and the closer the fibres are packed, the better the insulation. The reason why we need to conserve body heat in the winter is that the body is much warmer than the surroundings and would rapidly lose heat if exposed. But in warm weather, there is much heat coming in by radiation from warm surroundings and the body needs to lose heat. Any clothes we wear act as a blanket and create a warm layer around the body. And if we need to lose more heat because of exertion, the warmth can be oppressive.

When we need to cool rapidly, because of exertion or because of a warm environment, the sweat glands get active and cover the body with perspiration. This carries out some of the heat and, when it evaporates, it cools the body surface and draws out more heat. But if the body is covered by clothes and, of course, it usually is, perspiration collects and the discomfort multiplies. There is a way to treat fabrics so that they draw the perspiration out to the exterior, when it could dry and cause some cooling, but this treatment gets active only when there is perspiration, which is to say, when the body is pretty heated up already.

Yet another warm cover that we have is the atmosphere itself. The sun, which is very hot — some 6,000° Celsius — radiates mainly in visible light. The shortest light waves, towards the blue end of the spectrum, get scattered by the tiniest particles in the air but most of the energy, towards the red end of the spectrum, reaches ground level. The longer waves, the warm, infrared, do not get scattered by particles in the air but are absorbed by large molecules, like CO2 or methane, in the air and warm up the atmosphere. These molecules also absorb the heat that the earth itself radiates and keeps our planet from cooling down at night.

The Stanford group took the lead from the atmosphere to create a fabric that would allow heat waves to pass through and still block light of the visible kind so that the fabric would perform the social role of clothing. The reason that light at the blue end of the spectrum is scattered by the atmosphere, which gives the sky its blue colour, is that the air contains particles that are of the dimensions — around 500 nanometres — of the wavelength of blue light. Infrared waves at more than 1,000 nanometres are much longer than these particles and do not get affected.

The Stanford group examined an existing, normally transparent polyethylene fabric, but with the provision of nanopores from 50 to 1,000 nanometres in diameter. As the pores are of sizes comparable with the wavelength of visible light, visible light gets strongly scattered and the material is no longer transparent. The pores, however, are much smaller than infrared heat waves, which are able to freely pass through the material. The material, nanoPE, is found to allow 96 per cent of the heat waves to pass through, against only 1.5 per cent in the case of cotton fabric, which we usually wear in the summer. Normal polyethylene is also as good at allowing heat to escape, but it allows 80 per cent of visible light to pass through. NanoPE, on the other hand, is 99 per cent opaque. In trials conducted on a surface that mimics the temperature of human skin, it was found that a drape of nanoPE caused a rise in temperature of only 0.8° Celsius, as against 3.5° Celsius for cotton and 2.9° Celsius for commercially available fibrous PE textile.

Cotton clothing, despite the greater warming, is preferred to normal polyethylene because it soaks up any perspiration. Polyethylene garments, in contrast, allow perspiration to collect and can be quite uncomfortable in humid weather. One solution has been the use of “wicking” treatment, of a water repellent material that prevents the fabric in contact with the skin from getting soaked, along with a capillary structure that draws moisture to the outer side. This treatment has been found to help cotton fabric too. The use of this treatment could similarly increase the comfort of clothing made of nanoPE, whose porous construction also permits the permeation of air.

The paper by the Stanford group notes that nanoPE, or PE with nano-hole treatment, is commercially available as it is used in the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries. The team has also experimented with a cotton mesh sandwiched between layers of nanoPE and finds that this has mechanical strength and is suitable for use as clothing. The paper works it out that a drop in surface temperature by about two degrees Celsius implies that airconditioning in workplaces or homes can be set correspondingly, about three degrees Celsius, higher. The saving in cost is about 25 per cent for a two-degree Celsius raising of the AC temperature setting. The material could equally be used to check the temperature rise of tents, porta-cabins or vehicles.

The writer can be contacted at response@simplescience.in