The Argovia project nanoFACTS shall considerably contribute to develop innovative textiles with active cooling mechanism. Functional textiles like this could be worn by firefighters under insulating protective clothing. Cooling underwear would be a considerable relief during their hard work and would increase their safety.

We cannot imagine a closet without functional clothes anymore. However, not only for recreational textiles but also for protective working gear innovative technologies offer novel possibilities to equip clothes with special functions. One method to add functionality to textiles is to encapsule an active material and apply the capsules to the textile surface. However, the capsules need to have the right size. They should not be too large, otherwise they get washed off too easily. On the other side, they need to have a minimal size so that sufficient active material is captured. Studies have shown that the optimal capsules vary between 100 and 10´000 nanometer. Currently, existing encapsulation methods are not very suited to produce capsules in this range.

Within the project nanoFACTS scientists from the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (Prof. Dr. Uwe Pieles, Dr. Olfa Glaid, Dr. Johann Grognoux), of the University of Basel (Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Meier, Dr. Nico Bruns, Dr. Cornelia Pailvan, Dr. Olivier Braissant) and HeiQ Materials (Dr. Murray Height, Dr. Christoph Bradbury) strive to establish two encapsulation methods to tailor the capsule size between 100 and 10´000 nanometer. On one hand, they are pushing the emulsion technologies to smaller sizes (top-down approach). On the other hand they investigate new technologies (e.g. vesicles) in a bottom-up approach. First they will focus on the idea of developing functional capsules for thermal regulation of clothing. However, when the method is established it can be applied to various active ingredients and target functions.