Protective clothing provides laboratory and hazardous-materials workers, firefighters, military personnel, and others with the means to control their exposure to chemicals, biological materials, and heat sources. Depending on the specific application, the textile materials used in protective clothing must provide high performance in a number of areas, for example, impermeability to hazardous chemicals, breathability, light weight, low cost, and durability. Models based on computational fluid dynamics have been developed to predict the performance of protective clothing materials. Such models complement testing by enabling property data from laboratory materials tests to be used in predictions of the performance of integrated multilayer garments under varying environmental conditions.
