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Boron nitride nanosheets enhanced the thermo-optical properties of cotton fabric for energy saving and personal heat management

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Abstract

Herein, we report a cooling fabric with thermal conduction and radiative cooling capabilities through grafting hydroxylated boron nitride (BN-OH) nanosheets onto the surface of cotton fibers. The thermal conduction layer formed by BN-OH nanosheets enables the modified fabric with excellent thermal conductivity, which is 42% higher than that of the original cotton fabric. Resulting in the modified fabric exhibits great cooling power and increases the cooling setpoint temperature by 1 °C, which corresponds to reduced 11.2% indoor cooling energy consumption. Additionally, the Mid-infrared emissivity and solar reflectivity are increased to 90% and 70.4%, respectively, suggesting that wearing modified fabric under direct sunlight can enable the artificial skin to avoid overheating by 7.8 °C compared to bare skin. Moreover, the modified fabric also presents a considerable contact cool feeling, impressive wearability, and durability. We expect this work to present new insights for the design of personal thermal management textiles.

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Acknowledgments

All authors would like to thank shiyanjia lab (https://www.shiyanjia.com) for the support of XPS analysis.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51873195, 51803186), the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (No. LZ22E030004), and Special Support Program for High-Level Talents of Zhejiang Province, Outstanding Talent Project (No. 2021R51003), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2021YFA1301100, 2021YFA1301101).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou, 310018, China

    Yuanxiang Xiao, Shuangfei Xiang, Shujun Zhao, Feiya Fu & Xiangdong Liu

  2. Zhejiang Provincial Innovation Center of Advanced Textile Technology, 700 Yuhui Road, Keqiao Distrit, Shaoxing, 312030, China

    Shuangfei Xiang

Authors
  1. Yuanxiang Xiao
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  3. Shujun Zhao
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  4. Feiya Fu
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Y.X.: data curation, writing-original draft. S.X., S.Z. and F.F.: investigation and supervision. X.L.: writing-review and editing. all authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xiangdong Liu.

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Volunteers in the experiment gave written and informed consent before participation in the experiments. There was no damage to the human body during the experiment and no tissue samples were collected from the volunteers, hence approval from a national or institutional ethics board/committee was not obtained prior to the current study.

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Xiao, Y., Xiang, S., Zhao, S. et al. Boron nitride nanosheets enhanced the thermo-optical properties of cotton fabric for energy saving and personal heat management. Cellulose (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10570-024-05887-9

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