Thermoresponsive Skin-like Fabric for Personal Comfort and Protection

Acting as a "second skin", clothing plays an indispensable role in providing comfort and protection in the wide range of environments in which we live. However, comfort and protection are often competing requirements and are difficult to improve simultaneously. By mimicking the exceptional thermoresponsive one-way liquid transport property of human skin, here we developed a scalable and ecofriendly skin-like fabric that has a tunable directional water transport rate while having excellent water repellency. The water transport rate is also temperature-responsive, just like skin. As the temperature increases, the wettability gradient in the spatially distributed channels (acting like "sweat glands") increases, promoting sweat transport and evaporative heat dissipation. As the temperature decreases, on the other hand, the wettability gradient diminishes, reducing liquid transport and evaporative heat loss, thereby promoting heat retention. The fabric is highly suitable for sportswear and functional clothing and can have wider applications, such as oil-water separation, fog harvesting, etc.