On March 26th, the collaborative efforts of Associate Professor Zhu Bin, Professor Zhu Jia from Nanjing University, and Professor Xu Weilin, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a professor at Wuhan Textile University, were published online in Nature Chemical Engineering, showcasing their latest research achievement.
The study introduces a novel wound dressing with a daytime radiative cooling (DRC) function. In contrast to traditional wound dressings, this dressing can prevent wound overheating in outdoor hot environments, creating an ideal microenvironment for wound healing, suppressing inflammation, and accelerating the healing process.
The healing process of wounds is closely related to their local microenvironment, including factors like temperature, humidity, and sterility. However, traditional wound dressings lack effective thermal management capabilities. In hot outdoor environments, these dressings absorb sunlight, causing rapid elevation of wound temperature, which can trigger inflammatory responses and slow down wound healing. Daytime radiative cooling is a passive cooling technology that emits heat through the atmospheric transparency window to the cold outer space while reflecting a large amount of solar radiation heat. This technology achieves cooling without energy consumption and has immense potential applications in energy-efficient buildings and personal thermal management fabrics.
In this study, researchers for the first time introduced radiative cooling technology into the field of wound dressings. They proposed a layered structure design based on infrared-transmissive polyamide 6 and biocompatible silk protein. The dressing achieves an emissivity of 0.94 in the mid-infrared band and a reflectivity of 0.96 in the solar band, demonstrating excellent daytime radiative cooling optical performance. It can reduce temperatures by 7°C compared to the ambient temperature under direct sunlight. Meanwhile, its micro-nano fiber network structure ensures excellent properties such as breathability, moisture permeability, and antimicrobial activity.
Compared to traditional commercial dressings, the radiative cooling wound dressing effectively prevents the formation of a hot and humid environment at the wound interface in hot outdoor conditions. Experimental results on full-thickness mouse skin wounds under direct sunlight demonstrate that the radiative cooling dressing can suppress wound inflammation and accelerate wound healing rates. Differential gene expression in RNA sequencing further validates the accelerated wound healing function of the radiative cooling dressing under direct sunlight exposure.
The structural design and operational mechanism of DRC dressing under sunlight.
The DRC dressing for wound repair under outdoor sunlight performance was evaluated by the respondents with the image provided.
This study proposes and designs daytime radiation cooling wound dressings, providing a new approach to alleviate overheating of wounds under sunlight and accelerate wound healing, inspiring the design and development of biomedical applications in extreme environments.
The co-first authors of the paper are Dr. Qian Zhang (currently Associate Professor at Wuhan Textile University and formerly a postdoctoral fellow at Nanjing University), Dr. Chao Qi (Assistant Researcher at the First Hospital of Wuhan), and Xueyang Wang (Ph.D. student at Nanjing University); Professor Bin Zhu and Professor Jia Zhu from Nanjing University, and Professor Weilin Xu from Wuhan Textile University are the corresponding authors of the paper.
Related paper information:
https://doi.org/10.1038/s44286-024-00050-4
