Environmentally Driven Intelligent Textiles That Reversibly Actuate to Provide Large Change in Porosity, Loft, Shape, or Their Combination

Abstract Textiles that intelligently respond to changes in the environment by reversibly providing dramatic changes in structure for comfort, safety, or appearance are widely sought. In order to facilitate applications development, here novel intelligent textile structures are described and developed by using polymer artificial muscles and examples of structures and mechanisms are provided that can be used in the future. These actuating textiles, which deploy a host of muscle yarn and fiber types, can change their porosity with or without any change in fabric lateral dimension or can change their loft or can either bend or fold upon temperature change. The presented intelligent textiles provide a porosity increase up to 38.3% from room temperature to 40 °C, while they exhibit a decrease in porosity up to 26.1% from room temperature to −5 °C. Textiles that can bend at an angle of 60° at 40 °C, while exhibiting a complete roll‐up at 70 °C, are also presented. An important way to change the direction of actuation produced by environmental exposure is to transition from homochiral fibers to heterochiral fibers. Other more complicated yarn types can usefully deploy chirality effects, such as yarns that are twisted and coiled, or yarns that are twisted, coiled, and then plied.