Large-Scale Fabrication of Highly Filled Polymer Fibers for Radiation Protection Safety and Wear Comfort of Multilayer Fabrics in Complex Radiations

Developing wearable articles with radiation protection safety and wear comfort in complex radiations is one of the urgent issues because flourishing nuclear technologies lead to increasing radiation threats. However, current wearable articles either shield neutrons or γ-rays or display poor permeability of air and water vapor and so on, which leads to difficulty in satisfying the requirements of complex radiations. Herein, surface modification techniques are applied to construct sufficient hydrogen bonds between functional particles (B₄C and PbWO₄) and PVA matrixes for intensifying the interface interaction, which facilitate the smooth wet spinning of as high as 50 wt % B₄C/PVA and 70 wt % PbWO₄/PVA fibers under an exclusive pilot line for large-scale preparation. Then, both of the highly filled PVA fibers are woven into two kinds of fabrics that are overlapped for multilayer fabrics. They jointly shield neutrons and γ-rays while giving good permeability of air and water vapor. The overlapping two-layer B₄C/PVA and two-layer PbWO₄/PVA fabrics are provided with 72.90% thermal neutron adsorption (0.025 eV) and 38.62% γ-ray attenuation (105 keV). In addition, they also display 155.88 mm/s and 2536.37 g/m²·24 h air and water vapor permeabilities, respectively. Besides, good flexibility of the fabrics is not sacrificed in spite of the extremely high loading of functional particles in PVA fibers. This work provides a feasible approach to deal with the challenge of radiation protection safety and wear comfort of wearable articles in complex radiations.