In an announcement that is going to cause a lot of couples to sigh in relief, researchers from University of California, San Diego have come up with a wearable patch that cools the skin temperature down by ~10 Deg C. It is still in research phase but the basic prototype works and I am definitely in queue to buy this when it comes out. I love cool temperatures and my wife is the polar opposite and prefers hot and humid weather (30 Deg + ) so usually one of us is suffering. Its gotten to the point that I know that if I am feeling comfortable then she is cold. We usually end up carrying an extra jacket for her when we travel to moderately cold places and lots of cold water for me if we are going somewhere where she would be comfortable. This would allow us to keep the house warm enough for her without making me miserable due to the heat. According to the press release:
Thermoelectric systems use semiconductors to pump heat from one side of a device to the other, creating a cool zone and a hot zone. Such systems can provide compact, easily adjustable cooling, but getting them to efficiently dissipate heat has proved challenging.
Renkun Chen, Sheng Xu and their colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, addressed this problem by embedding multiple pillars of a semiconducting material between two stretchy polymer sheets. One sheet served as the hot zone, the other as the cool zone. This design conferred flexibility and insulated the hot and cold sides from each other, allowing the hot layer to dissipate its heat into the air.
This system would also have an application in offices. Usually the temperatures in office are kept cool because of research in early 60’s that calculated the optimal temperature taking into account the comfort of a forty-year-old, hundred-and-fifty-four-pound man wearing a business suit, (Learn more about the Sexist history of Office temperature here if you are interested) and this means that women in offices usually freeze and don’t perform at the peak of their performance. Once this patch is released, the office could be kept at a warmer temperature making it more comfortable for the women (and folks not wearing jackets/suits to office) and anyone who dislikes the warmer temperature (like me) would wear this patch and be comfortable as well. Decreasing the cooling required would reduce the load on AC’s and power infra as well.
So in conclusion I hope that this gets a commercial release quickly. 🙂
Source: Air conditioner ‘in a patch’ provides portable cooling – Nature.com
– Suramya