Cool undershirts
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SMARTWEAR: Together with Stein Yttereng
of Trondheim Fire and Rescue Service, Ingrid W. Langmoen has
developed an “intelligent” undershirt.
Photo: Gorm Kallestad
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This is the clothing that fire-fighters
have been waiting for: an intelligent undershirt that cools overheated
bodies
“These shirts are a valuable step in the
right direction. Clothing of this sort will lengthen the time that
smoke-divers can keep on working, perhaps to as much as twice as
long”, says evacuation and training leader Stein Yttereng of Trondheim
Fire and Rescue Service.
The special undershirt was developed as part
of the work by SINTEF and NTNU on “Smartwear”, or intelligent clothing.
Pockets on the inside of the vest hold plastic sachets of Glauber’s
salt (sodium sulphate decahydrate), a powder that melts when the
wearer’s skin temperature reaches 28 OC. This will provide cooling
relief for sweating smoke-divers, since the change of phase requires
heat, which the powder takes from the body.
“I was less exhausted afterwards than usual”,
said one smoke-diver who tried out the first prototype of the vest
during a training session.
FIREWOMAN AND
STUDENT
The story behind this unusual item of clothing starts with a meeting
between an MSc student at NTNU and her supervisor from SINTEF. Twenty-five
year-old Ingrid Wist Langmoen had matriculated at NTNU with a rather
unusual professional background for a woman: she had spent four
summers as a vacation substitute in the emergency section of the
fire brigade in her home town of Hamar.
FROM FIGHTER
PILOTS TO FIRE-FIGHTERS
For her MSc thesis on “Product development and production”, Ingrid
chose the topic of “Equipment and clothing for the fire-fighters
of the future”. Industrial designer Jarl Reitan of SINTEF Health
Research became her supervisor. Several of his colleagues had been
working on clothing for people whose jobs exposed them to heat,
such as fighter pilots. He advised Ingrid to pursue smartwear with
built-in cooling ability.
On the Internet, Ingrid found that smart
cooling vests for fire-fighters were already commercially available,
and a Swedish manufacturer sent her vests that incorporated Glauber’s
salt. In SINTEF’s climate chamber, she was able to demonstrate that
such vests did have the ability to cool the body, but she also realised
that they were too thick to allow perspiration to pass through them,
with the result that they became wet and unpleasant to wear.
Ingrid therefore found a thinner type of
garment, and experimented until she found the most effective locations
for the cooling pockets. As part of her MSc dissertation, she interviewed
fire-fighters in order to find out what they wanted from their underclothing.
Stein Yttereng of Trondheim Fire and Rescue Service gave her the
idea of using an undershirt rather than a vest.
WANTS SENSORS
IN CLOTHING
Ingrid hopes that her solution will be commercialised in
the future. So does Yttereng, who emphasises the cooling is extremely
useful for a smoke-diver precisely because it is “high body temperature
leading to fluid loss that does in for us”.
“We would also like to have sensors in clothing
to monitor heart-rates and the ambient temperature”, says the experienced
fire-fighter.
By Svein Tønseth
Contact: Jarl Reitan, SINTEF Health Research
Tel: +47 922 24 653, email: jarl.reitan@sintef.no
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