Experimental study on the thermal protection enhancement of novel phase change material integrated structural firefighting gloves under high-heat exposures

Phase change material (PCM) has been widely studied for efficient thermal management. This work is the first holistic experimental research on the temperature control performance of PCM-integrated firefighters' gloves. The results showed that the thermal protection time could be extended by 2-5 times in the direct contact to hot object tests and around 1.5 times under the radiant/convective heat source tests when embedding a 1-mm-thick PCM layer in gloves. The PCM of melting point 68 °C showed the best thermal protection performance in all test conditions since it had the most efficient phase change function during the heating process. Considering the PCM location effect, the PCM with lower melting point (68 °C) showed better performance when located close to external environment (heat source) and the PCM with higher melting point (108 °C and 151 °C) showed better performance when located close to hand. The optimum PCM thickness would be in the range of 0.5-1.0 mm for both thermal protection improvement and hand dexterity purposes. In addition, the time for continuous temperature rises on the hand surface at post-heat exposure was longer when embedding PCM in firefighters’ gloves due to the stored latent heat in PCM.