Air conditioned clothing

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Air-conditioned clothing is the term for clothing that actively cools the wearer. It is mainly used by workers in areas where air conditioning systems can not be easily installed, such as tunnels and underground construction sites. The air-conditioned clothing in the market does not operate by actually cooling the air, as do the air conditioning units of the room. Instead, it increases the natural cooling of the wearer's body by blowing air and sometimes moisture around the body, lowering skin temperature by evaporation of sweat and steam.

Patents for air-conditioned clothing have been around for years, but only a few of the products that are actually successfully marketed. Companies that bring air-conditioned shirts to market are Octocool, which is the largest online distributor of air-conditioned clothing. Attached to the outfit are two light fans that help draw air and help evaporate sweat. The fans, attached to the back of the clothes near the waist, are about 10cm wide and run on a rechargeable lithium ion battery that lasts between 8.5 and 59 hours depending on the fan speed.

One of the advantages of air-conditioned clothing is that it requires less energy to cool humans than to cool down their entire environment. For example, an air-conditioned shirt cools users wherever they go using 4,400 mAh of power for 8.5 hours at the fastest fan setting, while the average central air conditioning unit uses 3000 to 5000 watts of power. In many cases, the purpose of AC is not to cool things in the room, but people. Therefore, direct cooling clothing is much more efficient. The New York Times 2012 article reported that the gas commonly used in air conditioning absorbs about 2,100 times more infrared radiation per ton than carbon dioxide, and partly due to increased use of air conditioning in developing countries (especially in tropical regions such as India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil , and southern China), air conditioning is projected to account for about 27% of total greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Although there are some ideas for room air conditioning units that do not contribute significantly to climate change, none of them is not yet available on the market. Therefore, air-conditioned clothing can provide an important alternative for those who want to take care of themselves, and the planet, cool.