New cooling concept from Nike
27/08/2025
Jahan Behbahany, head of Nike Apparel Innovation, noted that “sweat evaporation plays a significant role in helping cool the body” and said that his team was looking to develop “a material that could accelerate the velocity of airflow to skin and help speed up that evaporative cooling process”.
Drawing on prior experience with all-over mesh materials, Radical AirFlow features an innovative open knit fabric whose “engineered airducts” are said to “capture air, speed it up and funnel it through the garment’s holes toward the skin”. Nike’s research teams said they were inspired by fluid dynamics and specifically the Venturi Effect, which it described as “when a fluid flows through a constricted section of pipe, it sees an increase in velocity and a drop in pressure”.
Transposing this principle to a mesh structure, the knitted fabric features layered holes, one larger than the other, which form the ‘airducts’. Raised elements, or ‘dimples’, are placed on the backside of the fabric to further optimise evaporative cooling. The design of the top was also ‘engineered’ for performance: the long-sleeves cool the arms, cut-outs at the armholes reduce chaffing and the cropped length allows more air to flow, said Nike.
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