Insulation Solution provides Light, Form-Fitting Fashions without compromising Warmth, and Comfort while reducing environmental impact.
In order to be protected from the cold, the key objective of an insulating garment is to keep the heat that the body radiates from being lost. There are three ways in which the body loses its internally generated warmth :
Conduction: When a medium touches the body it transfers or conducts the body heat away from the body to the matter that is in contact with it. In order to avoid this type of loss, we wear clothes which creates a shield that protects the body from contact with heat conductive materials.
Convection: Body heat can warm up the air surrounding the body. In order not to lose this warmth, it is necessary to trap the air around the body. The body must be surrounded by dead air, (air that does not move around). This shield of air, once it is warm, no longer conducts warmth away from the body.
Radiation: Body heat simply radiated away from the body. Until recently, nothing was found that would prevent this type of loss.
Clothes have always acted as a shield protecting the body from being touched by any solid matter that would conduct the body heat away from the body mass. Modern insulators have not brought about any change to this.
Applications
Human beings have always understood that wearing several layers of clothing keeps the body warm. Layers of clothing act as an air shield, blocking the air in between the clothes. Today we can create this effect by using lofty insulators. The fibers of these insulators creates little cells in which the air is trapped. The problem with this type of insulator has been that the loftiness required in order to prevent air movement was substantial and therefore garments were bulky and looked more like sleeping bags.
Today finer fibers have been developed which allow for the insulator to have a lot more cells in which to trap the air. Therefore a thinner insulator can be used and it will have the same thermo retention properties as a loftier product using thicker fibers. Loss of body heat through convection can be prevented with insulators referred to as mid loft, like the Polar Loft used in Nuage outerwear products.
In order to prevent the normal loss of body heat through radiation, it was recently discovered by an American fiber company, hired by the US army, that if the fiber being used to make the insulation was less than 1.5 denier, the body heat loss through radiation would be blocked. A 1.5 denier fiber is much finer and smaller than anything used before it effectively creates a net so tight that it is impossible for the heat wave to pass through it. Consequently heat loss by radiation from body matter is prevented.
Examples
In order to understand and differentiate between the various types of insulators available, the fibers used to make them are measured using a unit of linear mass density of fibers called a denier. A 5 denier fiber infers that 5 grams of fiber is required to produce a 9,000 meter long thread of fiber. The finer the fiber the lower the denier. A one denier fiber will only require one gram of fiber in order to make a thread of 9,000 meters. Fine denier fiber have several holes inside each filament which allows them to trap air. This also makes them virtually weightless.
In order to facilitate matters, fillers can be classified into 3 different categories as follows:
Regular poly-fills: these poly-fills use a fiber between 5 to 7 denier. In order to achieve the same body heat retention capacity as finer more high tech insulators this insulator will have to be bulkier and heavier.
Polar Loft Poly-fills: These insulators use a mix of fibers with an average denier of 2 to 3. As such these fibers are much finer and can produce a tighter web of air cells, insuring that the air does not move around as easily and therefore heat is not lost by convection although the poly-fill being used is not as lofty or heavy as regular poly-fill with the same heat retention properties. Ultra Loft poly-fills: This insulator uses a mix of very fine denier. The average denier is below 1.5 denier. This insulator succeeds in blocking heat loss by convection and by radiation due to its very fine web of air cells.
It should be noted that both Polar Loft and Ultra Loft poly-fills have an advantage over down as an insulator, they have heat retention properties that compares to down when dry however down dramatically loses its heat retention properties when wet or humid. Ultra Loft and Polar Loft do not lose as dramatically their heat retention capabilities.