Travelling to Antarctica? You could soon be as snug as a polar bear as three engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a synthetic textile modelled on the mammal’s fur.
- The trio have developed a bilayer fabric with its top layer composed of threads that, like polar bear fur, conduct visible light down to the lower layer. This lower layer is made of nylon and coated with a dark material called Pedot. Pedot, like the polar bears' skin, warms efficiently.
- Smart textiles enabler Soliyarn has already begun production of the Pedot-coated cloth.
THE RESEARCH: Results of the 80-year-old quest were published recently in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces with Wesley Viola, who completed his PhD in chemical engineering at UMass and is now at Andrew's startup, Soliyarn LLC, as the lead author.
- Trisha L Andrew, associate professor of chemistry and adjunct in chemical engineering at UMass Amherst, is the paper’s senior author.
- The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.
THE PREMISE: Scientists have known for decades that part of the bears’ secret is their white fur. One might think that black fur would be better at absorbing heat, but it turns out that the polar bears’ fur is extremely effective at transmitting solar radiation toward the bears’ skin.
- The fur is only half the equation. The other half is the polar bears’ black skin. Polar bear fur is essentially a natural fibreoptic, conducting sunlight down to the bears’ skin, which absorbs the light, heating the bear.
- The fur is also exceptionally good at preventing the now-warmed skin from radiating out all that hard-won warmth. When the sun shines, it’s like having a thick blanket that warms itself up, and then traps that warmth next to your skin.
THE BREAKTHROUGH: Taking off from the fact that many polar animals, including the polar bear, actively use sunlight to maintain their temperature, the trio engineered the bilayer fabric — Pedot, which like the polar bears' skin, warms efficiently.
- So efficiently, that a jacket made of such material is 30% lighter than the same jacket made of cotton yet will keep one comfortable at temperatures 10 degrees Celsius colder than the cotton jacket could handle, as long as the sun is shining or a room is well lit.
What they said:
Space heating consumes huge amounts of energy that is mostly fossil fuel-derived. This textile really shines as outerwear on sunny days, the light-heat trapping sucture works efficiently enough to imagine using existing indoor lighting to directly heat the body. By focusing energy resources on the 'personal climate' around the body, this approach could be far more sustainable than the status quo.
— Wesley Viola (Lead Author)
Former PhD Scolar
University of Massachusetts Amherst
