If you hate wearing shoes because your feet get hot there may be a solution coming soon! Graphene lined shoes. Using Graphene in shoes appears to give the shoe better thermal properties keeping your tootsie’s cool. FADEL, an Italian shoe company, has been working with the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia on a prototype to show off the concept. Not only will the shoe bring better thermoregulation but it will also provide better freshness. Cause we know how stinky sweaty feet can get!
The company is adding Graphene flakes to the polyurethane in the soles of the shoe and it’s shown to not only have better heat dispersion but also better waterproof properties.
‘One of the main properties of Graphene is its ability to dissipate heat, so we began to think of combining Graphene produced by liquid phase exfoliation, which produces large quantities of the material at a low price, into polyurethane – the material used for the sole of the shoe. This created a composite with a heat dissipation 50% better than the pure polyurethane material.’ said Vittorio Pellegrini, Director of IIT Graphene Labs and Chair of the Executive Board of the Graphene Flagship. ‘We improved the thermal properties with a tiny amount of graphene (around 1%) which is significant in delivering a product whose cost is not significantly larger than before.’
It’s an interesting project and as a person who hates to wear shoes because my feet do get hot, it could prove to be very useful. The prototype is a sandal so it will be more interesting to see this tested in a tennis shoe, dress shoe or even better a work shoe. Steel toe shoes tend to get hot and users of those types of footwear should see a huge benefit if this pans out.
What do you think of this new cooling technology for shoes? Do your feet run hot? Would you benefit from something like this? Let us know in the comments below or on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.
[button link=”http://graphene-flagship.eu/innovative-shoes-using-graphene-by-iit-and-fadel” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: GrapheneFlagship[/button]
