Generation Global EP8: Cooling Vests

0:00Discussion keeps the world turning. This is Round Table. In 45-degree heat, air conditioning is a luxury millions simply cannot reach. The researchers at the Beijing Institute of Technology are building something that you wear instead. Round Table's Yushan sits down with Ji-Wun-Jie and Fuyin, two members of the team behind a cooling vest that could change who survives the heat and who gets left behind. We are live from our studios here in Beijing. This is Round Table. I'm Steve Hatherley and I thank you very much for joining us today. And for the show, I'm with Yushan and Goyan. First up. During a heat wave, the most obvious solution is simple. You just turn on the AC, right? But what if you can't? Think of sanitation workers or construction workers doing physically demanding jobs in 45-degree temperatures or older people who may face health complications from spending too much

1:01time in heavily air-conditioned environments or a family in Paris that simply can't install an AC because of the cost or administrative hurdles. For all of the cases above, staying cool isn't as simple as turning down the thermostat. And that's why researchers around the world are looking for alternatives. One team at the Beijing Institute of Technology is developing a cooling vest that could tackle some of the long-standing problems with this kind of wearable technology, including cost and crucially, how long and how effectively it can keep you cool. Round Table's Yushan spoke with two of the team members, Ji Won-Jie and Fuyin, on the stories behind this cooling vest, and here is their conversation. Today I'm sitting down here with two distinguished researchers from Beijing Institute of Technology, Professor Ji Won-Jie and Dr. Fuyin, please just briefly tell us who you are. Hello everyone, my name is Ji Won-Jie from School of Mechanical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology.

2:04Hello, I'm Fuyin from School of Mechanical Energy, Beijing Institute of Technology. Nice, well, I've had the honor of going to the Beijing Institute of Technology before. It's such a beautiful campus who have over the years cultivated a lot of great researchers and scientists like you two who are sitting right in front of me. So today we have a very unique project that comes from you girls that we'd like to introduce to more people. So before I build the tea and tell everybody what it is, can you start with just a brief introduction on what you've been working on recently? Okay, sure. Broadly speaking, our research sites in the field of personal thermal management are called PTM for short. And the big picture is ice global temperature kept rising. We are seeing the news that more frequent and more intense heat waves. A traditional way to solve this kind of problem is used air conditioning to cool down the entire room.

3:12But it's incredibly energy intensive and if you go outside, it cannot work. You know that the total energy consumption of air conditioning is about 20 to 30% of the building energy consumption in the world. And in some tropical kilometer, the proportion is more than 50%. And the primary goal actually of air conditioning is to cool down the human body and to make people feel comfortable. So the idea behind PTM is to flip that model. We, inside of cooling down the environment around the person, we're just directly cooling down the person itself. So it is much more efficiency and you are targeting the heat stress where it really matters on the human body. Because we think it can help us with more energy of air conditioning because our primary purpose actually to make people feel comfortable.

4:12Nice, so smart. And our team has been working on developing variable solutions to keep individuals feel comfortable and safe in a hot environment. Whether they are indoors or outdoors. And cooling-wise was proposed, which is a portable and practical way to help people bring some active and passive coolings to the body itself. Cooling vest, yes. And actually on one hand, we are trying to find some personalized micelle, as I said before, to help to reduce the energy use of air conditioning. And on the other hand, we are also trying to enhance the body ability to adapt to the climate change and the heat exporters. That's a new idea or new perspective to look at climate change. Because when we talk about climate change, it's more often how the bigger ecosystem is going to put an impact on us.

5:13Instead of how human body can better adapt to the very much fast-changing climate nowadays. So, yeah, that's a new way of perceiving this topic. So we will cooling garment back and bounce both passive and active cooling. We set up the active cooling modules in a triangle on the back of the garment. And at the top point, it's a somewhat electric cooler, we call it TC for short. It moves the heat from the cosine to the cosine. So, can I understand it as a very smart device, who has a physical contact with our body at the back, I would assume. And it sucks up the heat from your body and used the fan to blow it out from the surface of your body. Is that how it works? At the two bottom corners we put two fans. They create air flow to make it feel cool. And the all layer is the ready to cool in material.

6:14It emits your heat into the sky. And it also reflects the sunlight efficiently. So, it can cool it down without any power. Yeah, it sounds like it's powering itself in some way and saves energy by just complete the whole heat transformation. On the surface of your body, on its own, instead of wearing a battery or something. So, what inspired you to arrive at this conclusion of designing such a device? Wow, actually the inspiration actually came from different places. I still remember doing the CO819 pandemic. I've seen the reports that some medical staff, the Galt-Head exhaustion, about the wearing the protective suit. Actually, it could say that they were totally drenched in a humid and hot environment for a long time. That really struck me. These medical staff, they have no choice. They just need to work in that condition. And the suit, which was supposed to protect them, also putting them at risk.

7:17So, from that time, I recognized that if we can develop something, some system or device, which can help people regulate their temperature, it was of great importance. Actually, many workers in various occupations, they will fail the same problem about the overheating, such as delivery drivers, construction workers or street cleaners. They just need to work in a hot environment, no matter how hot it gets. The second point is that we already have latest news about deadly headwaves in Europe. Now, many of the buildings in Europe, they don't have any air conditioning installed. And the local policy has some restriction of install new ones. Another point is that we also read the reports about in our southern part of our country. There are some news about the power rationing at the peak time of air conditioning in summer.

8:21So, from all these sparks, we have got this problem, that we have lots of limitations, maybe, such as space constraints, electricity constraints, because of energy use of air conditioning. And we also have the urgent demand of the workers who are working in hot environment. So, that's why it's really collected for us. We need a personal, portable solutions, which could help people to feel more comfortable in this kind of environment. I think that's what got us start. Exactly. Headwaves have already hit those people hard. They may feel awful, and sometimes they can be dangerous, even left-rightening. So, our initial idea was to focus on people who really needed and build a cooling government just save lives. And we gradually realized that extreme heat is a big problem for casual users too, so we start thinking about the general public.

9:22And we also get inspired by backsharing. We want this product to become something like public communities. You don't have to buy it. You can just rent it whenever you want. Wow, the idea of learning from how it's operated in the bike sharing industry is really niche and smart idea. But I do wonder, why a vest? Why not a t-shirt or a coat or anything? Like, what does the shape of a vest bring advantage to your design? Well, I think, first of all, it is lightweight and no restrictive. You don't want to burden someone who is already working in a hot environment. That's really some heavy things. And the worst form factors keep the arms and legs completely free and completely free. So, it doesn't interfere with movement. And, next, I think, the most importantly, a site from the perspective of some physiological.

10:23Our core and back are the main parts of human body to dissipate hate. So, if you can cool down this critical part of the body, you may get larger comfort benefit. And actually, because our modular design of this waist, the cooling unit, are detachable with velcro. So, the concept actually isn't limited to waist. You can easily integrate it with long-slave garment. Yes. So, I think it will be useful for the people in Middle East or in a desert where the solar radiation is intense. But, actually, but for most use cases, the waist is the sweet sport between effectiveness and practicality. Speaking of cooling vest, I think I've heard about it, or perhaps I've seen it on maybe Amazon or like international e-commerce platforms,

11:25that there are other modal types existing already. Some with, I think, they use water as a cooling medium. And then, others that I've seen that's already been on trial projects here in China is the vest with fans on it. Like, I think it's in Nanzing in Eastern China where some of the public cleaning workers, they're already wearing those vests with fans on, and when it works, it looks kind of funny because it puffs the person up a little bit. So, that is one thing. And the water cooling vest is another thing. Now that with this very unique detachable device you mentioned on your design, what's so unique about your design? What kind of a new idea did you put into your design? We have so very quite a few cooling garments on the market. For example, there's a water coat one on Amazon that weighs about 6 pounds. That's a lot to carry around.

12:27And it needs hoses and pumps. So the whole thing gets pretty complicated. And you have to change the water when it warms up. The air coat one is lighter, but it doesn't have a real cooling source. It just blows the air around to make you feel a little bit cooler. Just wearing a few fans on you instead of facing a fan like how we do in our living rooms. The air blows the garment up like a balloon. So it gets in the way and doesn't look great either. Our cooling garment had the GEC at the cooling source with fans to blow air on you to make you feel cool and take the heat away faster. What's more, we add a relatively cooling material. It directly reduces the baseline heat load. That means the battery doesn't work so hard. So it's less longer and the whole thing lasts longer too.

13:27That's really impressive. And I also heard from you too just now that you mentioned like people like delivery riders, like street cleaners who cannot avoid working under the heat. They're kind of like the prime groups of people who can potentially be the audience of your product once it enters the market. But are they the intended users of this product or are there more other groups of people who can also benefit from it? Our expectation for this cooling garment is three forward. We want everyone to be able to put it down, cool down right away and get a stroke or anything like that. For outdoor use, it can protect workers like delivery drivers, construction workers, street cleaners, power line technicians and traffic police. And also outdoor sports fans like hikers, climbers, golfers and marathon runners, among others.

14:30In the future, if it really becomes public communities, everyone all in the heat can grab it and put it down and time. And let me talk about indoor and everyday life scenarios or we'll be used in the future maybe. We're thinking about office workers in the building where the air conditioner is either too weak to strong or non-existent or the outer people who are more sensitive to the heat, but they don't want to open the air conditioning for the whole day because of the electricity bill. I used to live with two migraines who refused to turn on the AC because they believe is a waste of electricity that the heat is nothing. So we really spend a long time trying to help them understand, no, this is life and death. If you don't want the AC to blow right into your face, go to another room, turn it on in another room, don't go in there but let the cold air flow out. So yeah, for a lot of elders, it is really a mind blowing thing to really embrace the idea of AC.

15:35Yes. And all are even for just the regular people who have different comfortable preferers. I think many couples may argue about the suicide settings. Like females prefer a woman one and males like a cooler one environment. So I'm sure the point is personalized cooling matters. So why cool an entire room to maybe 22 degree when you only need to cool down just one person and let one people feel comfortable. So our government actually have for adjustable power levels and the TSA model and the funds can be controlled independently. So if you are just sitting at your office desk, maybe you can just open it at a low level of the fund. And if you go outside, you can adjust this module. This active modules attached this Velcro. So you can detach them easily.

16:41It means the system can adapt to many different scenarios. Looking ahead, I think there's a potential of customization of this government, maybe different size, different college areas, or maybe some common design for specific professionals. Yeah, totally. Imagine construction workers who work with the neon yellow and orange vests on with a little bit of modification and adaptation. I can totally see your little device attached to their vests without changing the design of the existing style and also trying to help them cool them down. Speaking of this very unique device, did you or other members of your team manually pulled it together yourself or did you have somebody or a manufacturer designed for you? Actually, we make it manually and we also asked some factory to help us to provide us some modules.

17:42But you guys also just made it manually with your own hands. There's a spirit that people on social media talk about every day. It's called Shou Tzuo. Start from ground zero with barely any resources. You just use your own hand to put something together. Does Shou Tzuo happen a lot in your lab with where without this project? Actually, it's not frequent in our daily work. Honestly, this is quite a shift for us. In our day to day, academic work, we usually focus more on pushing the boundary of specific matrix, for example, to improve just one parameter of cooling power of a material or just optimizing the thermal interface. Looking at was scientifically possible and was state of the art, but turning into a working product requires a completely different mindset.

18:45Did you encounter a lot of challenges in the process? Yes. If you make this change, you're not just optimizing just one parameter. You need to consider more factors such as the cost, durability, the user experience about this product, the battery life, the white, and all these factors don't show up in just one lab paper. But it will have enormous influence of the person who really veered this comment. So for me, personally, the biggest eye opener was realizing that the best technology in the life is it not always make the best product. Yeah. Observing how you get your hand dirty, like you mentioned, and getting your entire lab room messy because of the manually putting together of the device just made me really think that nowadays our Chinese scientists is really working hard on tackling real issues.

19:48That can make an impact out there that can change something as big as climate change that's faced by the entire world. So I'm really impressed by it. And I think this is a good chance for you to just share with the rest of us who don't work in the lab to know that actually our scientists are not all like white robe doing fancy computing. We're actually getting our hands dirty, getting our feet wet and exploring things from ground zero. That's really important. Also, how do you see like the role the Chinese scientists are playing nowadays in terms of actually tackling global challenges brought by the climate change nowadays. I know people scientists from all around the world are all working on this very topic. How do you see it from the viewpoint of a Chinese researcher? I think Chinese researcher and engineers could play important role and the money was already on.

20:48If you look about the field of some regulation or climate adaptation, you will find lots of latest contributions are from Chinese researchers whether about the latest advanced material or smart textile technologies. I think something that really side Chinese scientists apart is their strong sense of social responsibility and a desire to benefit for general public. They truly believe that tackling global climate change and ensuring safe, better life for humanity is what give their work meaning and value. But what's particularly exciting I think is China's strong in rapid prototyping and manufacturing scale up. It is one thing to demonstrate some new ideas in the live and it is another process to produce it affordably at scale.

21:51China has the ecosystem from the materials to manufacturing to market testing that allows good ideas to become real products quickly. I think there's also a growing awareness of Chinese researchers that we need to move beyond just the publishing papers and climate change isn't waiting for us. So we need to translate our understanding about the science to some tangible solutions which could really use for people. That's a gap we are trying to bridge with this cooling gamut. Yeah and it's also very impressive to see you both really trying to make science understandable and simple enough for people outside of your expertise to really understand what you're doing. I think that's impressive too. And the very fact that before the show I was chatting with you Dr. Foo that I realized you're actually a few years younger than I am, which is so impressive because the very fact that there are continuously young people, young researchers joining this workforce, joining this whole project of combating bigger challenges.

23:02It's important for not only the Chinese research and academic field but also worldwide how we can make this impact benefit more people. So I would be interested to know that what's your viewpoint that younger generation, the younger researchers, how they're going to benefit or rather what they're going to bring on the table in the near future. What I'd really love to see from the next generation is a breakthrough in the barrier between research and real work application. And to often we see brilliant demonstrations never leave out the university because researchers don't think more about the cost, the durability, the user experience, these kind of things at the first day. I hope young scientists will identify the core problem and the fox small on the solutions that they are really practical, not only technical elegant.

24:04And since you mentioned about the possibility, let me share something maybe like an imagination in the future. Yes, maybe an ideal version of this product would be something that doesn't need a battery. Imagine a cooling garment that can harvest energy from your own moment, from your walking, from the temperature difference between your skin and the environment or even from the sweat. If the next generation can create self-powered, reliable cooling, that would be revolutionary. No charging, no battery and dirty and no weight, you just put it on and it can keep you cool. That's the future I'm holding for. Wow, when you say without a battery, the only thing I can think about is everybody wearing not that big but a photovoltaic sunlight collector or something that can power it. But from sweat, from motion, that's something so unimaginable and sci-fi-like.

25:09But do you see that coming true in any time soon? Yes, actually I have some reports about this as I mentioned, you can get energy just from human moment. Walking around. Yes, because you know that walking, our moment of a personal just walking or doing some sports is also kind of energy. So we can find some way, maybe to collect this kind of energy and transfer the energy into the form we want, like electricity or some or cooling. That's very awesome to hear and I do hope that your product will enter market perhaps in the next year, next summer, next July I'm going to rent, scan and rent a little vest from the side of the street and then walk around to charge it and then get myself cold down and return it outside of my office, hopefully. And yeah, all the best on the design of your product and thank you so much for spending your time sharing your design with us today.

26:10Thank you. Interesting topic. Thank you to Yushan and Jiwon Jiye and Fuyeng from the Beijing Institute of Technology. As we were sitting here listening to this conversation, Goya, and you were kind of impressed by this. Yeah, we're really called my attention in this interview is not just the cooling garment itself, but the whole idea behind behind it. Instead of cooling the whole environment, why don't we just cool the person directly? I think it's a cool idea, which is a small idea, but with much bigger meaning because it connects technology with energy, climate change and our everyday lives. Yeah, and also I really like the idea that they were mentioning. Of course, this is a project about maybe the environment, maybe the summer heat, the whole climate and everything. And I really like the idea of they are saying they are trying to develop that concept from the campus. And a lot of these projects and demonstrations are just surviving within the campus.

27:15And they're trying to promote this outside of the campus. And we mentioned that, right? Research that has real world applications. Exactly. And we actually know that there are a lot of now daily necessities actually come from a lot of these campus ideas. Shared bikes is actually first introduced in within these campus. Oh, is that right? I didn't know that. Yeah, so and now we're like everybody actually need them on a daily basis. So maybe these kind of projects I really like them to just probably develop and also export from the campus scenarios and maybe putting to our daily lives. I think the concept of searching for solutions to cool us down beyond air conditioning is a really worthwhile thing. Climates are getting hotter. Also, I learned something air conditioning accounts for I think they said 25 to 30% of a building's completed total energy consumption.

28:17But in hotter climates, that can go up to 50%. Yeah. So yeah, like you said, go ahead. Instead of cooling the environment around us, why not just cool the person? So this idea is great. And then what they talked about last is kind of exciting, even more exciting. If they can do this without a battery, if they can do this without water pumps and water tubes inside six pounds, I think they said it weighs so that can be a little bit cumbersome to wear. If we ourselves can power the thing that cools us down, that would be an impressive piece of technological advancement. Thanks again for the chat really interesting. you