A new liquid cooling strategy for firefighting based on heat interception

Incorporating cooling capacity into personal protective equipment has been identified as an effective approach to mitigate heat accumulation and prevent thermal injuries among firefighters. Traditional liquid cooling strategies (TLCS) typically focus on cooling the body after excessive heat accumulation has occurred, which may not be optimal for human health. In this paper, we propose a new liquid cooling strategy (NLCS) by embedding liquid cooling technology into firefighters' suits to create a composite protection system that intercepts heat before it enters the microenvironment under the suit. The performance of the NLCS was evaluated through thermal protective performance tests. The experimental results demonstrate that the protection time of the NLCS is up to 120% higher than that of the TLCS. And the best protective performance and energy consumption can be achieved when the embedding position, pipe length, inlet temperature, and water flow are set to P2, 54 cm, 15 °C, and 0.5 L/min, respectively. This work contributes to a better understanding of the performance of liquid cooling in firefighting garments and provides valuable insights for the design of firefighters' protective clothing incorporating liquid cooling technology.