79. Textile Coatings for Personal Cooling

As the effects of climate change become more severe and widespread, maintaining personal thermal homeostasis becomes both necessary for survival and increasingly energy intensive. In principle, advanced textiles and garments have the ability to leverage light absorption, transmission and/or reflection, in addition to straightforward convection, to heat or cool bodies in extreme temperature conditions. For cooling, in particular, surfaces adept at selectively reflecting or refracting high-energy incident light (200 nm - 2.5 microns) from the sun while transmitting or emitting infrared light (8-13 microns) from radiant body heat boast the ability to maintain cooler body temperatures, even when exposed to direct sunlight and the open sky. I will detail the materials science and engineering advances made in my research lab to develop a durable textile coating that transforms common clothing into implements for passive personal cooling. A polyester poplin fabric finished with a microstructured, lamellar coating comprised of calcium carbonate and barium sulfate shows a cooling ability of up to 8°C compared to an unfinished sample, achieving a maximum cooling of 3.4°C below ambient temperature in optically-complex built environments. Wash and durability testing of the lamellar coating revealed no mechanical degradation and no evident attenuation in the material's performance, affirming its resilience and long-term effectiveness as a functional textile coating for personal cooling. Professor Trisha L. Andrew (she/her/hers) is a Professor of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science & Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She directs the Wearable Electronics Lab, a multi-disciplinary research team that uses chemical vapor deposition to create a variety of functional coatings on unconventional substrates, such as textiles, yarns and plants, and demonstrates the uses of these coated samples in energy harvesting/storage and integrated sensing systems. Trisha began her independent career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison after receiving her Ph.D. from MIT in 2012, and moved her research program to UMass Amherst in 2016. She has unconventional training in the disparate fields of synthetic organic chemistry and microelectronic device fabrication that inform her unique problem-solving skills and varied research interests. Trisha is a David and Lucille Packard Foundation Fellow, a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow, an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator, a L’Oréal USA For Women in Science Fellow, a 3M Nontenured Faculty Award winner, and was named as one Forbes’ magazine “30 Under 30” Innovators in Energy. To learn more, go to: https://welab.umass.edu