Thermal and moisture management in the human body or built environment is essential to thermal comfort and health performance of the humans in daily life. Smart materials that can switch structures and properties depending on external stimuli have attracted increasing attention in regulating heat and moisture transfer and maintaining thermal comfort, such as in smart clothing and building systems. Although various materials and manufacturing breakthrough, many of these technologies still face limitations in design versatility, material compatibility and multifunctionality.

Nature has a great power to endow marvelous functions on many living creatures and materials through biological evolution process. Learning from the nature can be an effective approach to design new functional smart materials that serve for global challenges such as food, water, medicine, energy and sustainability. In this talk, I will discuss several smart materials and manufacturing methods that enable an integrated pathway for creating biomimetic multifunctional systems with environmental response towards comfort improvement and energy saving. First, I will present the design, fabrication and characterization approaches that exploit smart clothing systems with “skin-like” directional liquid transport properties and “leaf stomata-like” pore open/close responsiveness. Next, I will update the work on smart “leaf stomata” autonomous membranes for passive temperature regulations, such as heating/cooling systems in vehicles or buildings. Finally, I will conclude my work by discussing new possibilities in developing smart material systems with unique functionalities for environmental response and energy sustainability in the built environment.