Materials in advanced design of personal protective equipment: a review

The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has aroused tremendous attention toward personal protective equipment (PPE) in both scientific research and industrial manufacture. Despite decades of development in PPE design and fabrication, there's still much room for further optimization, in terms, of both protection performance and wear comfort. Interdisciplinary efforts have been devoted to this research field in recent years. Significantly, the innovation of materials, which brings about improved performance and versatile new functions for PPEs, has been widely adopted in PPE design. In this minireview, recent progress in the development of novel materials and structural designs for PPE application are presented in detail with the introduction of various material-based strategies for different PPE types, as well as the examples, which apply auxiliary components into face masks to enrich the functionalities and improve the personal feelings in the pandemic period.