Hump-Inspired Hierarchical Fabric for Personal Thermal Protection and Thermal Comfort Management

摘要

Personal protection is critical for firefighters to ensure their safety in anextreme fire environment. However, conventional firefighter uniforms tendto focus on thermal protection and have the bottleneck of lacking personalthermal management. The heat stress caused by poor thermal managementinevitably detriments human body health. Here, a hump-inspiredhierarchical fabric (HHF) composed of hierarchical insulation structure anddirectional water transport is demonstrated for personal thermal protectionand thermal comfort management. The results show that the HHF exhibitsenhanced thermal insulation ability and endows continuous one-way liquidflow through distributed sweat-wicking channels. Compared to conventionalfirefighter uniform fabrics, HHF shows simultaneously low thermal conductivity(0.0192 W m~(?1) K~(?1)) in the cross-plane direction and high breathabilityand moisture permeability. It is observed that the temperature and relativehumidity of the simulated skin covered-HHF uniform at extreme condition(≈80 ℃) are ≈20.6 ℃ and ≈13.6 lower than that of conventional firefighteruniforms. It is expected that the HHF fabric with exceptional thermal performancecan make a significant impact on future development of advancedprotection uniform for firefighters.