Bioengineers at the University of California, Davis, have developed the world's first high-tech fabric, which drains away sweat from the human body and keeps the fabric dry.
Bioengineers at UC, Davis, have developed a water-proof fabric that can drain sweat away leaving the fabric dry. The new technology can be widely used in various sports where high physical activity is required.
There has been a high demand for good quality sweat-draining fabrics among fitness fans and athletes and the new fabric meets all the requirements. The water-proof material replicates the function of a skin, where droplets of sweat are formed on the layer on the skin and are drained away. Similarly the new cloth absorbs droplets of water from one side, pushes them along the threads and expels them from the other side.
The new fabric developed by two graduate students of UC, Davis, Siyuan Xing and Jia Jiang, used hydrophilic (water-attracting) threads stitched in a design to drive the droplets to the other side of the fabric. A water-repellent fabric was used for the stitching so despite the absorption of the droplets of water the fabric does not get drenched.
"We intentionally did not use any fancy microfabrication techniques so it is compatible with the textile manufacturing process and very easy to scale up," Xing, a lead biomedical engineering student on the project, said in a school news release.
The fabric is also designed to control where the droplets of water can be collected and drained, so the remaining areas remain dry.
The research team is prepared to share the technology with well-known sports brands like Adidas and Nike, according to Tingrui Pan, a biomedical engineering associate professor, reports CNet. He further adds that in the fabric, the "biofluid can be transported to the desired drainage sites without wetting the substrate," which can be useful in other fields too.
The research describing the functions of the fabric is published in the journal "Lab on a Chip." It was partly funded by the National Science Foundation.
Watch the video below that shows how the fabric absorbs the liquid and expells it from a dedicated exterior side of the fabric.
