Fast Sweat Wicking Enabled by Unidirectional Water Transport in Biodegradable Trilayered Porous Membranes Produced via Papermaking

Abstract

Specialty textiles with excellent moisture-wicking technology are essential for satisfying personal comfort, coupled with the widespread concern that conventional functional textiles put a huge strain on the environment due to their nondegradable nature. Therefore, we demonstrated a simple strategy to prepare biodegradable trilayered porous membranes based on a conventional papermaking process by assembling two raw materials with different wettabilities, plant fibers (PF), and poly (lactic acid) (PLA), constructing trilayered PF/(PF-PLA)/PLAnw membrane with wettability gradients and pore gradients, which allow the water to flow unidirectionally from the hydrophobic layer to the hydrophilic layer through capillary forces and eventually evaporate as the air flows. The resultant porous membranes exhibit a desirable accumulative one-way transport capacity (AOTC) of 993%, a remarkable water evaporation rate of 0.52 g h^–1 ,and an excellent tensile strength of 7.26 kN m^–1, providing a brand-new insight into the design of biodegradable functional fabrics and serving as a green alternative for sweat-wicking fabrics to alleviate environmental pressure.