Recent trends and future scope in the protection and comfort of fire-fighters’ personal protective clothing

Abstract

Fire-fighters’ personal protective clothing is the only source of protection for fire-fighters during fire-fighting. The protective clothing should provide adequate protection as well as should be comfortable to wear. The protection and comfort requirements are always the contradicting fact in several protective clothing including fire-fighters’. Appropriate material selection, clothing design and final evaluation of the results play a critical role in predicting the clothing performance and comfort. Several researches have been done on the performance and comfort improvement of fire-fighter’s protective clothing. However, detailed review related to these parameters is not being reported in recent years. In this perspective review, we report the recent trends in the performance and comfort properties of the fire-fighters protective clothing. The clothing design and different materials used to achieve a balance between performance and comfort is illustrated. Various test standards related to the performance and comfort is also being discussed. In addition, the future scopes and challenges while designing tomorrows advanced protective clothing are cited. This would provide a guideline in terms of comfort and performance while developing and designing the fire-fighter protective clothing for different climatic conditions.