A Biomimetic Transpiration Textile for Highly Efficient Personal Drying and Cooling

Efficient sweat release and heat dissipation are required for functional textiles that improve comfort and productivity while being worn in daily life. However, the porous structure of textiles exhibits an opposite effect on water transport and heat transfer capacities, leading to a longstanding bottleneck for the design of multifunctional drying and cooling textiles. Here, a biomimetic transpiration textile based on the hierarchical and interconnected network of vascular plants is demonstrated for highly efficient personal drying and cooling. The transpiration-inspired design offers a textile with distinct advantages, including a desired one-way water transport index (1072%), rapid water evaporation rate (0.36 g h(-1)), and outstanding through-plane (0.182 W m(-1) K-1) and in-plane (1.137 W m(-1) K-1) thermal conductivities. Moreover, based on the optimized performance, plausible mechanisms are proposed and calculated to provide insight into the water transport and heat transfer within the hierarchical and interconnected network, which provide promising benefits to the development of multifunctional drying and cooling textiles. Overall, the successful synthesis of this biomimetic transpiration textile provides a comfortable microclimate to the human body, thus satisfying the growing demand for better health, productivity, and sustainability.

Automated summary

The biomimetic transpiration textile demonstrated in this study, based on the hierarchical and interconnected network of vascular plants, shows highly efficient personal drying and cooling capabilities. The optimized performance and proposed mechanisms provide promising benefits for the development of multifunctional drying and cooling textiles.