A piece of clothing material that can keep you cool without ACs

If not for air conditioners, summers could be unbearable for hot cities like Delhi or Chennai. But, unfortunately, they are not portable devices that you can carry along all the time. So what's the solution? Maybe, a piece of clothing that keeps your temperatures down by cooling down the body.

Some US researchers have created a low-cost textile made of a plastic base that could cool the body when woven into clothing. According to the engineers, the textile could become a way to keep people living in hot climates cool without using air conditioning. How cool is that!

"If you can cool the person rather than the building where they work or live, that will save energy," said Yi Cui, an associate professor of materials science and engineering and of photon science at Stanford.

The invention included blending nanotechnology, photonics, and chemistry to develop the material, which cools the wearer in two ways. Like cotton, the textile allows sweat to evaporate through the material, but the new development allows it to also let through heat the body gives off as infrared radiation.

"Forty to 60 percent of our body heat is dissipated as infrared radiation when we are sitting in an office," said Shanhui Fan, a professor of electrical engineering. "But until now there has been little or no research on designing the thermal radiation characteristics of textiles."

Researchers tested the cooling capabilities of the experimental material by putting swatches of the plastic material and cotton fabric on bare skin and compared skin surface temperature.

"Wearing anything traps some heat and makes the skin warmer," Fan said. "If dissipating thermal radiation were our only concern, then it would be best to wear nothing."

The cotton fabric made the skin 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the new material, suggesting that wearing the "cooling textile" might make people less likely to resort to turning on fans or air conditioners.