Self-sustaining personal all-day thermoregulatory clothing using only sunlight

The human body must stay within a certain temperature range for comfort and safety. However, challenges for thermoregulatory clothing exist for harsh application scenarios, such as full day/night cycles, frigid polar regions, and space travel. We developed a flexible and sustainable personal thermor...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science) 2023-12, Vol.382 (6676), p.1291-1296
Main Authors: Wang, Ziyuan, Bo, Yiwen, Bai, Peijia, Zhang, Shuchao, Li, Guanghui, Wan, Xiangjian, Liu, Yongsheng, Ma, Rujun, Chen, Yongsheng
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Harsh environments
Photovoltaics
Power sources
Sunlight
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Summary:The human body must stay within a certain temperature range for comfort and safety. However, challenges for thermoregulatory clothing exist for harsh application scenarios, such as full day/night cycles, frigid polar regions, and space travel. We developed a flexible and sustainable personal thermoregulatory clothing system by integrating a flexible organic photovoltaic (OPV) module to directly acquire energy from sunlight and bidirectional electrocaloric (EC) devices. The flexible OPV-EC thermoregulatory clothing (OETC) can extend the human thermal comfort zone from 22°-28°C to 12.5°-37.6°C with a fast thermoregulation rate. The low energy consumption and high efficiency of the EC device allows for 24 hours of controllable and dual-mode thermoregulation with 12 hours of sunlight energy input. This self-powered wearable thermoregulatory platform has a simple structure, compact design, high efficiency, and strong self-adaptability with sunlight as the sole energy source.
ISSN:0036-8075
1095-9203
DOI:10.1126/science.adj3654