Integration of Janus Wettability and Heat Conduction in Hierarchically Designed Textiles for All-Day Personal Radiative Cooling

Personal cooling textiles are a promising energy-free pathway for confronting serious heat-related public health threats and improving industrial worker productivity. Current cooling strategies mainly focus on passive daytime radiation, and there is a lack of research on all-day cooling methods which utilize synergistic radiative, conductive, and evaporative heat dissipation. Herein, we demonstrate a hierarchical polyurethane/silicon nitride fibrous membrane with Janus wettability fabricated via a scalable electro-spinning method followed by single-side hydrophilic plasma treatment. High angular-dependent solar reflectance (91%) and human body infrared emittance (93%) allow for a temperature drop of similar to 21.9 degrees C under direct sunlight and similar to 2.8 degrees C at night compared with traditional cotton. The innovative integration of Janus wettability and heat conduction in hierarchically designed textiles ensures a minimum sweat consumption of 0.5 mL h(-1), avoiding harmfully excessive perspiration. The excellent all-day cooling performance of this hierarchical textile presents great advantages for smart textile, energy-saving, and personal cooling applications.

Automated summary

Personal cooling textiles provide a promising energy-free solution to tackle heat-related public health threats and improve industrial worker productivity. This study demonstrates a hierarchically designed polyurethane/silicon nitride fibrous membrane with Janus wettability, which shows excellent all-day cooling performance and can be applied in smart textiles, energy-saving, and personal cooling applications.