The new Spritzler 5000 is a space-age helmet that you fill with 20 lbs of ice and then let the ice water slowly drip down your back. A flexible straw allows you to drink the ice-cold rum punch out of the helmet's center to remain "relaxed" on a hot day.
The Summer Is So Hot, Workers Are Wearing High-Tech Ice Packs
New technologies are making what had seemed like science fiction possible as jobs keep people outside for long periods
By Christopher Mims, WSJ
Aug. 23, 2024 9:00 pm ET
In his 2021 novel “Termination Shock,” about a near-future Earth that is much warmer, science-fiction maestro Neal Stephenson imagined that in the hottest and most humid parts of the world—including Texas—people would don spacesuits, but for Earth, called “earthsuits.”
That science-fiction future is, for millions of Americans, our present. Heat waves are more intense and longer thanks to climate change. For people who work outside in hotter regions or in broiling indoor spaces like large warehouses without air conditioning, heat injury, illness and even death are a growing concern.
New technologies for keeping people cool no matter the conditions are growing in popularity and sophistication. Used by soldiers on patrol, fast-food workers or mascots in costumes, what they have in common is simplicity, affordability and ease of use—all factors that have limited the deployment of this technology to date. These real-life Earth suits have the potential to keep people from suffering heat injury when the weather outside exceeds the temperature and humidity at which the human body can effectively cool itself.
Swords to plowshares
IcePlates, made by Knoxville, Tenn.,-based Qore Performance, fit neatly under body armor, and also into vests that are now worn by workers in industries ranging from fast food to warehouses. The simplicity of systems like these, which cool the body the same way ice cools a drink, is their greatest asset, says Josh Hayes, who oversees 29 locations of the Dutch Bros coffee chain in the greater Phoenix area.
On the August afternoon I called him, the temperature in Phoenix was 103 degrees, which isn’t unusual for this time of year. Hayes’s workers—who were assigned to stand outside, taking orders from drive-through customers—were wearing IcePlates in high-visibility vests.
Hayes estimates he has more than 500 such plates spread across his locations, and the plates are constantly rotated in and out of dedicated freezers. They prevent his workers from becoming fatigued as they’re blasted by high outside temperatures, hot air venting from cars, and the oven-like radiant heat of asphalt that can reach temperatures in excess of 150 degrees, he says.
People who once worked under him have implemented the technology at other local quick-service franchises, he adds. Chick-fil-A and Black Rock Coffee Bar locations in Tempe both use it, as well.
Shake Shack, the burger chain, uses IcePlates in vests and backpacks at 33 drive-through locations in 17 states, says a company spokesman.
The earliest example of contemporary personal-cooling technology was developed by Britain’s Royal Air Force in the years immediately after World War II, and adapted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the late 1950s and early 60s for its Mercury program, the first effort by the U.S. to send humans into space. Pilots and astronauts in flight and spacesuits were overheating because their heavy protective clothing prevented body heat from escaping. The solution was garments webbed with tubes carrying water, air or another fluid across the surface of the body to carry that heat away.
By far the biggest investor in this tech has been the U.S. Department of Defense, says Michael Sawka, a researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology who has been working on the problem of how to prevent heat stress in people for more than 50 years. Concerns about keeping soldiers cool when wearing chemical-weapons-proof clothing, and when operating inside of tanks in hot environments, drove much of the research, he adds.
Personal cooling systems involving tubes and pumps are remarkably effective, and continue to be used today for medical applications such as treating neurological conditions or helping with healing after injury. But they’re complicated, finicky, and require a lot of power to run, says Sawka. They’re also unsuited to workers who need to be constantly on the move.
These challenges drove the U.S. military to ask manufacturers to develop a different way to cool soldiers who must carry heavy loads while wearing layers of heat-trapping body armor.
Justin Li, co-founder and chief executive of Qore, found the Army’s requirements—that a device provide 140 watts of cooling over two hours, without adding any weight to soldiers’ already considerable load—impossible to meet no matter what combination of technologies he tried, including batteries, pumps, fans and portable solar panels.
Then he had dinner with a friend, Marcus Capone, formerly a member of the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, popularly known as SEAL Team Six. Capone says he told Li that on missions in hot environments like Iraq and Afghanistan, members of his unit would freeze packs of drinking water and place them in pants pockets and under their body armor. Li seized on this idea, and developed a system, now known as IcePlates, that uses thin, rectangular, plastic, “plates” with enough capacity to hold 50 ounces of frozen water, shaped to fit the curves of the human body.
Phase-changing materials
Probably the most popular technology for keeping humans cool through direct conduction of heat away from the body are so-called phase-changing materials, which is a fancy term for the synthetic gels that are typically found in freezer packs that go into coolers and lunchboxes.
A search on Amazon will turn up dozens of manufacturers of vests lined with pliable gel packs that can be frozen and then worn to help cool the body, but Pepeyn Langedijk found most of them weren’t very durable or—flattering. “The ones that you could buy were too thick, or the cooling packs were on the wrong position on your body, which made you look fat,” says Langedijk.
This was a problem because Langedijk had a very particular application in mind, related to one of his hobbies: he wanted to keep people known as Furries—who wear full-body animal costumes—from overheating.
What started as a side project eventually became a thriving business, and his Netherlands-based company, EZ Cooldown, now provides cooling vests to theme parks, cosplayers, people in the military, and a Formula One team. One of the advantages of using phase-changing materials, says Langedijk, is that it’s possible to tweak their formula so that they can start at a temperature higher than the freezing point of water, which many people find more comfortable on their skin, while still lasting for hours.
Gary Howe, co-founder of U.K.-based Mascots Inc., says that cooling vests from EZ Cooldown have been a “game-changer” for his company, letting it develop costumes wearable even in very hot environments, such as when the company created dozens of costumes for the 2020 World Expo in Dubai.
It’s also possible to use multiple methods of cooling in concert with one another. One option popular in Japan is the “fan jacket,” and the U.S. arm of Japanese toolmaker Makita sells these garments stateside. These jackets include an actual fan—or two—and are enabled by the more advanced motors and batteries that are also going into modern power tools, says a company spokesman.
Next-generation systems
In many circumstances, keeping workers cool requires an all-of-the above approach, including shade, light-colored clothing, synthetic performance fabrics to enhance the effectiveness of sweating, and conductive cooling systems.
In the future, we might even get something as sophisticated as the “earthsuits” of Stephenson’s imagination. Using sensors to detect which parts of a body need cooling at any given moment, it should be possible to deliver cooling to exactly the parts of a garment where it’s needed, without causing discomfort.
Research on such systems for the Defense Department, known as microclimate cooling, has already shown promise. “This is a technology that I think with advanced materials and better control systems, some company will develop,” Sawka says.
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