Scalable dynamic radiation-regulation fabric for improving body comfort under varying ambient temperatures

Fabrics maintain body thermal comfort by regulating the balance between body heat dissipation and metabolic heat generation. The body heat dissipated through radiation accounts for around 40% of total body heat dissipation, which draws much attention in recent years. Conventional fabrics mainly focus on single-mode radiation regulation (i.e., cooling at high temperatures or warming at low temperatures). Although some dual-mode fabrics have been developed, they typically rely on external power inputs and complex configurations. More critically, their incapacity of autonomous dynamic regulation compromises their effectiveness in maintaining thermal comfort under varying ambient temperatures (e.g., human working from hot outdoor into air-conditioned room). To address these challenges, this study employs facile and scalable techniques (e.g., spinning coating) to develop temperature-adaptive fabric on basis of Fabry-Perot (FP) resonator. This design enables the fabric to autonomously adjust its exterior surface emissivity in response to ambient temperature change. Through systematic parameter optimizations, the fabric achieves optimal emissivity modulation of 0.25. Experiments demonstrate that compared to conventional fabrics, the developed fabric can expand comfort zone by 1.8 °C in cold conditions and 1.1 °C in hot conditions. Numerical model is further constructed and validated, which provides a universal tool to systematically investigate the impacts of multiple parameters (e.g., convective heat transfer coefficient) on thermal performance of the developed fabric. Moreover, the fabric exhibits desired wearability and durability, which promotes its potential application in real-world scenarios. © 2026 Elsevier B.V.