By: Dan
A new fabric has been made that can keep you up to 4 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than cotton. Scientists in Stanford University developed a plastic fabric that can keep you cool even in the hottest days. It is extremely breathable for water vapor and heat that your body releases. This means that the fabric allows your body to release heat as if you weren’t wearing anything at all.
This has huge impact on more than just fashion or sportswear. If the clothes can cool the person instead of using energy for air conditioning, lots of energy could be saved.
The fabric allows water vapor to squeeze between tiny pores in the fabric. The material is similar to the plastic we use to wrap food, and has a molecular structure that allows heat to pass through easily.
Currently, a problem that needs to be worked on is its transparency. The material is naturally transparent, and that’s obviously not a desired property of clothes. If you dye it, you change the molecular structure of the material, thus making its ability to bleed heat useless. You can, however, make the fabric out of a variant of the plastic, that makes it opaque, but a disgusting beige color. It also feels a bit plastic-y, which is uncomfortable compared to cotton, which is soft and flexible. However, I’m sure the team can come up with solutions to these problems.
