Wireless power may still be on the drawing board, but wireless data is here today, and a UK defense contractor has figured out a way to pipe the latter through several inches of steel. Using a pair of piezoelectric transducers on either side of a watertight submarine compartment, BAE’s “Through Hull Data Link” sends and receives an acoustic wave capable of 15MHz data rates, enough to transmit video by essentially hammering ever-so-slightly on the walls. BAE impressed submarine commanders by streaming Das Boot right through their three-inch hulls, and while metadrama is obviously the killer app here, the company claims it will also save millions by replacing the worrisome wiring that’s physically routed via holes in a submarine’s frame
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UK defense firm pumps data through solid submarine walls
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Tags: acoustic, acoustics, bae, bae systems, communication, dasboot, hull, patentapplication, piezoelectric, piezoelectrics, through data hull link, throughdatahulllink, wargadget
Piezoelectric materials work quite simply, in theory — motion in, electricity out, or vice versa — and since that’s just how speakers and microphones transmit their sound, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine someone would figure out audio on a micron scale. That someone is MIT’s Yoel Fink, who’s reportedly engineered a marvelous process for producing fibers that can detect and emit sound.
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MIT’s piezoelectric fibers can act as speaker or microphone, don’t mind auto-tune
Piezoelectrics are nothing new — though most applications, they’ve proven to be far more theoretically useful than practical. Still, the technology is starting to move in a direction that could prove more applicable to everyday situations — and a new piezo material recently developed could really get the ball moving. Called PZT, it’s made of nano -sized fibers of lead zirconate titanate, which are applied to thin (and we mean thin) ribbons of flexible silicone rubber
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Scientists to bring piezoelectrics and rubber together to form flexible, wearable energy harvester
