As heat waves intensify, keeping people, packages and gadgets cool without extra energy is climbing the global tech wish-list. A Donghua–Jiangnan University team led by Prof. Chao Zhang and Prof. Tianxi Liu now unveils a single-step bicomponent blow-spinning route that delivers kilometre-scale rolls of an ultra-flexible, self-healing micro-fibre textile engineered with two built-in gradients—one in fibre diameter (2.0 → 0.3 µm) and the other in polymer chemistry (PVDF → PMMA). The dual-gradient architecture behaves like a Janus optical engine: the sun-facing side reflects 98.7 % of solar irradiance while beaming 95 % mid-IR radiation to outer space; the human-facing side absorbs a broad IR spectrum, pulling heat away from self-heated objects such as electronic housings or human skin. Outdoor tests show 7.8 °C sub-ambient cooling for neutral objects and 13.6 °C temperature drop for internally heated enclosures—outperforming commercial aluminium-coated shade cloth by more than 5 °C.
Why This Matters
Innovative Design & Features
Applications & Future Outlook
The gradient-textile paradigm shifts radiative cooling from static, single-emission surfaces to adaptive, healable fabrics that can be manufactured, deployed and repaired on demand—pointing toward a truly sustainable route to beat the heat anywhere under the Sun.
Nano-Micro Letters
News article
Scalable and Healable Gradient Textiles for Multi‑Scenario Radiative Cooling via Bicomponent Blow Spinning
5-Dec-2025