Personal Thermal Management via Engineered Optical and Transport Phenomena

The energy demand for cooling has nearly doubled in the last twenty years, namely the worldwide energy request went from 3.6 EJ in the years 2000 to 7 EJ in 2019 and recent studies reveal that if the efficiency in cooling technologies will not increase, then in the next twenty years the energy request will more than double due to the higher human activity. Personal thermal management aims to control the local temperature of the body providing a sustainable cooling effect that can potentially save both energy and money. This work presents a numerical and experimental characterization of both mass and heat transfer through smart polyethylene fabrics that exploit the simple structure of PE to guarantee both high transparency in the infrared region to enhance radiative heat transfer with the environment and visible opacity. Here, the performances of different PE fabrics are compared with conventional textiles, i.e. cotton, both in indoor and outdoor conditions. The higher cooling capacity that PE textiles demonstrate makes them a cheap and affordable solution to diminish the energy demand for air conditioning in a sustainable way.