Can you imagine? Under the blazing midday summer sun, slipping on a vest instantly brings perceived temperature down to around 25°C!

On the scorching noon of July 28, Huang Shijing, a female traffic motorcyclist from Hefei, Anhui Province, patrolled the streets wearing a custom phase-change smart cooling vest. She told reporters that her daily outdoor duty often leaves her uniform soaked in sweat.

“It feels far cooler in this vest,” she said. The vest delivers noticeable and long-lasting cooling, just like carrying a portable air conditioner.

The phase-change smart cooling vest is a real-world policing application of innovations from the inaugural AI Creation Competition hosted by the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC).

Jointly guided by Professor Nie Binjian, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford and Chief Energy Scientist at the Oxford Institute for Advanced Studies (Suzhou), and Professor Jiang Jun from USTC’s Center for Scientific Intelligent Material Creation, the vest was developed by Zhou Zhenyu, a PhD student at the University of Oxford, and Fang Tiancheng, a PhD student at USTC.

Leveraging Lingjing Creation, an independently developed intelligent scientific research cloud platform built by USTC, the team cracked core technical hurdles for the material in just three weeks.

“Tailored for scientific research, Lingjing Creation’s AI can rapidly analyse substances. Acting as an AI chemist, it replaces manual work and boosts precision and efficiency hundreds of times over human researchers.”

With support from Lingjing Creation, the team developed this vest. Once worn, it lowers perceived temperature from 35°C to below 27°C instantly. The cooling effect lasts roughly six hours. Placed in an air-conditioned room, the vest regains its cooling capacity within 30 minutes and can withstand more than 100,000 cooling cycles.

Beyond the cooling vest, the inaugural USTC AI Creation Competition has yielded a range of new materials spanning everyday life to future industries, including sun-protective materials, fusion-related materials and solid-state batteries.