Integrated Firefighting Textile with Temperature and Pressure Monitoring for Personal Defense

Area of Science:

• Materials Science
• Textile Engineering
• Sensor Technology

Background:

• Existing firefighting clothing lacks integrated early fire warning and motion sensing capabilities.
• Current protective gear offers limited intelligent personal protection in complex, high-temperature conditions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an
• all-in-one
• hierarchically sandwiched fabric (HSF) sensor for intelligent personal protection.
• To enable simultaneous temperature and pressure sensing for enhanced firefighter safety.
• To address the challenge of mutual interference in multimode sensing.

Main Methods:

• Designed a cross-arranged structure using core-sheath composite yarns and graphene-coated aerogels.
• Fabricated a hierarchically sandwiched fabric (HSF) sensor.
• Integrated large-scale HSF sensors onto conventional firefighting clothing.

Main Results:

• The HSF sensor demonstrated wide-range temperature sensing (25–400 °C) without pressure interference.
• Achieved highly sensitive pressure response (up to 120 kPa) with good thermal adaptability (up to 400 °C).
• Successfully integrated sensors for passive/active fire warning and spatial distribution detection.

Conclusions:

• The developed HSF sensor offers a promising solution for intelligent firefighting protective clothing.
• This technology provides a useful design strategy for real-time monitoring and enhanced firefighter safety.
• The sensor facilitates passive/active fire warning and spatial pressure/temperature distribution detection in high-temperature environments.