Highly Flexible, Efficient, and Sandwich-Structured Infrared Radiation Heating Fabric

Controlling thermal energy is one of the biggest concerns along with the progress of human civilization for thousands of years. Current thermal comfort devices are mainly based on materials that are bulky, rigid, and heavy, largely limiting their widespread practical applications. It still remains a challenge to develop highly lightweight, flexible, and efficient electrical heaters for personal thermal management and local climate control. In this work, we present a high-performance composite infrared radiation heating fabric (IRHF), which mainly consists of two layers of poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) fabrics and one sandwiched layer of carbon nanofibers embedded with different inorganic nanoparticles. A copper electrode sheet was connected with the carbon nanofibers to form a conductive heating circuit. The permanent spontaneous polarization of both carbon nanofibers and infrared radiation nanoparticles can facilitate an enhanced current in the heater by creating an additional electrical field, which results in a fast electrothermal response and favorable heat preservation. The constructed IRHF could achieve an increase in the temperature to 43 °C from room temperature in 1 min under a voltage of 30 V, with an electrothermal conversion efficiency up to 78.99%. With a collection of compelling features such as good thermal stability, excellent flexibility and breathability, and high electrical conductivity and energy conversion efficiency, the fabricated sandwich-structured IRHF can open up new opportunities to develop smart heating textiles and wearable heating clothes in many fields.