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TORONTO — Researchers say they have successfully made a synthetic version of polar bear fur that is not only lighter than cotton but also warmer.
Three engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a two-layered fabric that models not just the bear's fur but also its black skin that helps it stay warm.
The researchers say their work, published on April 5 in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, caps an 80-year quest to create a textile that mimics polar bear fur.
They say the fabric is already in development for commercial use.
"While our textile really shines as outerwear on sunny days, the light-heat trapping structure works efficiently enough to imagine using existing indoor lighting to directly heat the body," Wesley Viola, the paper's lead author, said in a university news story published on Monday.
"By focusing energy resources on the 'personal climate' around the body, this approach could be far more sustainable than the status quo."
The researchers say polar bears' white fur is effective at transmitting solar radiation toward their skin.
"But the fur is only half the equation," Trisha L. Andrew, the paper's senior author, said. "The other half is the polar bears' black skin."
Andrew says polar bear fur acts as a "natural fibre optic," conducting sunlight to the skin, which absorbs the light and heats the bear.
At the same time, the fur also helps prevent the skin from radiating too much warmth, akin to a thick blanket that warms itself up and then traps the heat, the researchers say.
The synthetic fabric works in a similar way with a top layer of threads that conducts light to a lower layer made of nylon and coated with a dark material called PEDOT, which warms up.
The researchers say a jacket using this material would be 30 percent lighter than another made of cotton but would leave the wearer more comfortable at temperatures 10 degrees Celsius, as long as the sun is out.
The scientists say a Boston-based company called Soliyard has already started producing cloth coated in this PEDOT material.
