Scalable Mie-Silk textile for dual-mode personal cooling indoors and outdoors
Radiative cooling textiles are typically designed for specific indoor or outdoor conditions, limiting their environmental adaptability. Here, we report a continuously spun molecular interface-engineered silk (Mie-Silk) that integrates radiative and conductive cooling for effective body temperature regulation in diverse settings. The Mie-Silk has a natural silk yarn core with high mid-infrared (MIR) emissivity and a surface layer of ZrO<sub>2</sub> nanoparticles (NPs) enabling strong solar scattering based on the Mie scattering principle. Natural silk fibroin acts as a robust binder, anchoring the NPs on the silk surface securely. Woven Mie-Silk achieves outdoor radiative cooling through high solar reflectivity (92.54%) and MIR emissivity (97.13%) within the atmospheric window. Indoors, where radiative cooling is less effective, its thermal conductivity (0.19 watts per meter-Kelvin) facilitated by densely packed NPs provides obvious cooling capability. This Mie-Silk, with effective cooling across varied environments, represents a promising candidate for next-generation personal thermal management clothing.
Authors
- Donghang Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2607-7968)
- Huarun Liang
- Xiaochuan Dai (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1876-8558)
- Lehua Qi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5657-3658)
- Haojie Lu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3915-2178)
- Linli Gan
- Jiongke Jin
- Yida Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-3922-6123)
- Mengjia Zhu
- Peng Bi
- Shuying Wu
- Mei Zou
- Xun-En Wu
- Yaoyao Zhou (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-7406-4261)
- Siling Lin
- Yingying Zhang
- Wei Fan
Institutions
- Textile Research Institute (US)
- Tsinghua University (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Science Advances
- Published
- 2026-03-04
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aea4369
- Primary Topic
- Thermal Radiation and Cooling Technologies
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00