Advanced cooling textile technologies for personal thermoregulation

Cooling textiles have attracted significant attention for dramatically improving the energy efficiency and reducing the overall energy consumption when compared with age-old cooling and refrigeration systems owing to absence of moving parts, noise-free operation, environmental friendliness, long lifespan, and ease of control. Advanced cooling textiles, which offer unique merits of light weight, three-dimensional deformability and wearability, can significantly minimize the cooling volume while meeting personalized cooling needs. Here, we have systematically reviewed the state-of-the-art cooling textiles technologies including traditional cooling technologies by improving conduction and convection, sweat evaporation and cutting-edge cooling technologies such as radiation cooling, Peltier effect cooling and electrocaloric effect. We mainly discussed these cooling technologies in the aspects of candidate materials, working principles, configuration design, fabrication and their cooling performances. Current remaining challenges and perspectives of cooling textiles were also discussed. This review work may offer hints to guide the design and fabrication of high-performance wearable cooling technologies.