Asymmetric Design for a High‐Performance Indoor Radiative Heating Fabric
Résumé
Improving radiative heating performance of textiles is becoming one of the most current research topics to reduce the energy consumption used to control the indoor areas temperature. In this work, the properties of a textile-based asymmetric design for radiative heating are studied both theoretically and experimentally, and its remarkable efficiency over a wide range of temperature is demonstrated. By sandwiching a thin metallic layer characterized by a high reflectivity in the mid-infrared (MIR) between two polyethylene (PE) membranes of same thickness, it is proposed to control the MIR emissivity of the structure by the introduction of SiO2 nanoparticles (NPs) in one of the two PE membranes. By reversing the fabric side to side, a wide comfort zone can be achieved for medium and low ambient temperatures, typically between 7.1 and 16.3 °C. Moreover, it is shown that, when transferred on a regular textile, the fabric performs the same functionalities. The experimental demonstration is done by considering an equivalent asymmetric structure with thicker membranes, without NPs. The fabrication and characterization processes are reported and a good agreement is obtained between the Fourier transform infrared spectra and the numerical data.