CORE-T: Liquid Ventilation and Cooling

CORE-T is the liquid ventilation and cooling garment. It provides thermal management and physiological regulation across the CORE suit platform and is the hardware element common to all four domains.

WHY HEAT LIMITS MISSION DURATION

The body rejects metabolic heat primarily through evaporation. Garments that block evaporative cooling remove that mechanism.

NIOSH criteria on occupational heat exposure address the effects of clothing on heat exchange and physiological monitoring. In encapsulating protection, heat strain typically limits mission duration before barrier performance or air supply in temperate conditions.

FOUR THERMAL PROBLEMS

In land operations, vapour-impermeable CBRN and firefighting ensembles trap metabolic heat.

In space, vacuum removes conduction and convection. Heat rejection is radiative or through consumables.

In subsea work, water conducts heat away rapidly, and helium-based breathing mixtures conduct heat from the respiratory tract at depth.

In high-altitude aviation, pressurised counter-pressure garments trap heat under sustained workload.

ARCHITECTURE

Liquid cooling loops circulate coolant through tubing in contact with the body, transporting heat to a rejection point. Ventilation adds a parallel path where a breathable atmosphere is available.

Combining both allows one architecture to serve environments where evaporation works and environments where it does not.

CONTROL

A fixed setpoint over-cools at rest and under-cools at peak work. A system responding to measured core temperature, skin temperature and work rate matches capacity to demand.

That makes the telemetry layer a life support input rather than a monitoring output.

Thermal performance is characterised on SUITRIX rigs with SYNHUM generating representative metabolic heat.