An 80-year endeavour to develop a synthetic fabric inspired by polar bear fur has been successfully accomplished by three engineers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Plans are in motion to transform the material into items that are readily available on the market after the results of their innovation were recently published in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.
Polar bears are renowned to live in some of the world’s harshest habitats and can withstand Arctic temperatures of -50 degrees Fahrenheit.
In essence, polar bear fur acts as a natural fiberoptic, transporting sunlight to the bears’ skin, which then absorbs it and warms the animal. Nevertheless, the fur is also remarkably effective at keeping the newly warmed skin from radiating all that hard-earned warmth. The warmth of the sun acts as a thick blanket that warms up and then traps itself next to your skin.
In order to conduct visible light down to the lower layer, which is made of nylon and covered with a black substance called PEDOT, Trisha L. Andrew, associate professor of chemistry and adjunct in chemical engineering at UMass Amherst and her team designed a bilayer fabric. The top layer of the fabric is made up of threads that, like the fur of a polar bear, transmit visible light. PEDOT heats quickly, just like the polar bear’s skin.
So effectively, in fact, that a garment made of such material is 30% lighter than a similar jacket made of cotton yet, as long as the sun is shining or a room is brightly illuminated, will keep you comfortable at temperatures 10 degrees Celsius colder than the cotton jacket could handle.
“Space heating consumes huge amounts of energy that is mostly fossil fuel-derived,” says Wesley Viola, the paper’s lead author, who completed his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at UMass and is now at Andrew’s startup, Soliyarn, LLC.
“While our textile really shines as outerwear on sunny days, the light-heat trapping structure 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.”
The research, which was supported by the National Science Foundation, is already being applied, and Soliyarn has begun production of the PEDOT-coated cloth.
