Titre de la dissertation: »Dual-mode thermoregulation with passive photonic textiles ».

Promoteur: Monsieur Bjorn MAES

Résumé de la dissertation: Surprisingly, more than half of our energy consumption goes to the heating and cooling of large, mostly
empty spaces in residential and commercial buildings. Therefore, passive photonic textiles for personal
thermal management, which create a localized thermal regulation, can become critical to lower
consumption, and guarantee a sustainable future. In this work, we propose various dual-mode photonic
fabric designs that provide thermal regulation in both cold and hot environments: 1) We utilize metalcoated monofilaments arranged in a hexagonal geometry with stimuli-responsive polymer actuator beads,
to benefit from the infrared photonic effects, and to control the radiation transmission with a sharp,
dynamic response. 2) We propose a design based on metal microspheres randomly dispersed in a shape
memory polymer membrane, which capitalizes on the intense scattering properties, leading to a strong
reflectance modulation as a function of the volume fraction. 3) We report a Janus-yarn, asymmetric fabric,
leading to dual emissivity characteristics, which is achieved with metallic and dielectric fibers, and static
switching is achieved via fabric flipping. 4) We introduce a structure with metallic islands on top of a highemission carbon fiber layer to dynamically modulate the emission to the ambient through mechanical
shrinking and expansion. The islands are made from temperature-sensitive shape memory polymer
nanofibers using electrospinning and coated with metal. 5) We explore wrinkling surfaces for emission
modulation by tailoring their shape and size with various material combinations, for application towards
passive temperature regulating textiles