Moisture-Wicking and Solar-Heated Coaxial Fibers with a Bark-like Appearance for Fabric Comfort Management

Maintaining the human body's comfort is a predominant requirement of functional textiles, but there are still considerable drawbacks to design an intelligent textile with proper moisture absorption and evaporation properties. Herein, we develop moisture-wicking and solar-heated coaxial fibers with a bark-like appearance for fabric comfort management. The cortex layer of coaxial fibers can absorb moisture via the synergistic effect of the hierarchical roughness and the hydrophilic polymeric matrix. The core layer containing zirconium carbide nanoparticles can assimilate energy from the body and sunlight, which raises the surface temperature of the material and accelerates moisture evaporation. The resulting coaxial fiber-based membrane exhibits an excellent droplet diffusion radius of 2.73 cm, an excellent wicking height of 6.97 cm, and a high surface temperature of 61.7 °C which is radiated by simulated sunlight. Moreover, the designed fabric also exhibits a significant UV protection factor of 2000. Overall, the successful synthesis of such fascinating fibrous membranes enables the rapid removal of sweat from the human body textile, providing a suitable and comfortable microenvironment for the human body.