Breathable 'second skin' to protect soldiers against biological and chemical threats

Developed by a team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the material is said to be the first key component of future smart uniforms that will also respond to and protect from environmental chemical hazards. The research appears in Advanced Materials.

High breathability is a critical requirement for protective clothing to prevent heat-stress and exhaustion when military personnel are engaged in missions in contaminated environments. Current protective military uniforms are based on heavyweight full-barrier protection or permeable adsorptive protective attire that cannot meet the critical demand of simultaneous high comfort and protection, and provide a passive rather than active response to an environmental threat.

The LLNL team fabricated flexible polymeric membranes with aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) channels as moisture conductive pores.

"We demonstrated that these membranes provide rates of water vapour transport that surpass those of commercial breathable fabrics like GoreTex, even though the CNT pores are only a few nanometres wide," said Ngoc Bui, lead author of the paper.