Radiative cooling cellulose-based fabric with hierarchical structure for outdoor personal thermal management

Personal thermal management is significant in alleviating the heat stress of pedestrians and outdoor workers. There is a need to develop a wearable fabric to further improve the comfort and cooling efficiency of outdoor personnel. Herein, we report an eco-friendly hierarchical cellulose-based fabric with excellent passive daytime radiative cooling (PDRC) performance. The obtained radiative cooling cellulose-based fabric (RCCF) possesses high solar reflectivity of 90.2 % in the solar spectrum (0.3–2.5 μm) and high emissivity of 98.1 % in the atmospheric window (8.0–13.0 μm). Under a solar radiation of 728 W·m−2, the simulated skin temperature covered with RCCF was 6.5 °C lower than that of original cotton. Moreover, the RCCF provides desirable wearability performance, and can be further applied in large-scale production due to simple and low-cost coating processes. The excellent cooling performance of this hierarchical cellulose-based fabric is promising to bring new insights into the design of next-generation functional textiles.