Functional non-woven fabric with directional moisture transport and ultra-fast evaporation properties is demonstrated.

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.

It has been widely acknowledged that the moisture (sweat) management in the textile is a crucial performance to adjust human comfort. Herein, a double‐layered fibrous mat of modified polypropylene (PP)/cotton fabric for the function of directional moisture transport was reported. The PP fibers were deposited on the surface of cotton fabric via melt‐electrospinning to form as‐prepared fibrous mat, wherein the PP mat was used as the inner layer and the cotton fabric acted as the outer layer. The as‐prepared fibrous mats were modified by means of plasma treatment and grafting hydrophilic groups for the sake of converting natural hydrophobicity of PP fibers into moderate wettability. After these treatments, sweat can be transport from the inner layer to the out layer rather than accumulating on the surface of the PP layer, while the capillary action of the cotton fabric on sweat was further enhanced. The directional moisture transport was systematically characterized by a moisture management tester and the experimental results exhibited remarkable accumulative one‐way transport index (1,103.1%), outstanding overall moisture management capacity (0.91) within 120 s and high water vapor transport rate (11.3 kg d−1 m−2). Besides, the obtained fibrous mat also provided decent wearability, showing the great application prospects in the moisture (sweat) management of textiles.

With the frequent occurrence of extreme weather, using massive energy inputs to maintain the thermal stability of the indoor environment or the human body has become common, and such excessive overuse of nonrenewable energy has created numerous significant problems for modern society. Personal thermal management textiles which can provide the better thermal comfort with less energy consumption than the room heating devices have attracted vast attention in recent years. A polypyrrole/polyurethane/zirconium carbide (PU/PPy/ZrC) fiber with superior electrothermal/photothermal conversion was fabricated via a simple two-step strategy. The surface temperature of PU/PPy/ZrC fibers can reach 51.7 °C under IR lamp irradiation and 55.8 °C at 2 V. In addition, excellent electrical conductivity can be maintained even though the fiber has been stretched to 150%. Due to the porous and hollow structure of the PU/PPy/ZrC fiber, the fiber exhibits outstanding thermal stability and can reach a temperature difference of 5.2 °C. The excellent quick-drying properties allow for fast and complete drying of the material in both modes. Combined with the considerable mechanical properties and hydrophobicity of the PU/PPy/ZrC fiber, it demonstrates the outstanding potential and broad development of this dual-driven fiber for basic research and practical applications in personal cold protection.