Acoustic fibers Photo: Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT/Greg Hren Photograph
For the past decade, Yoel Fink, an Associate professor of Materials Science and principal investigator at MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics, and his team (Shunji Egusa, Noémie Chocat and Zheng Wang) have been working to develop fibers with properties that enable them to interact with their environment.
The fibers can detect and produce sound. “You can actually hear them, these fibers,” says Chocat, a graduate student in the materials science department. “If you connected them to a power supply and applied a sinusoidal current then it would vibrate. And if you make it vibrate at audible frequencies and put it close to your ear, you could actually hear different notes or sounds coming out of it.” Strong vibrations vary the optical properties of a reflecting fiber, enabling fabrics to communicate optically.
Potential applications include: clothes that are themselves sensitive microphones for capturing speech or monitoring bodily functions, tiny filaments that measure blood flow in capillaries or pressure in the brain, loose nets that monitor the flow of water in the ocean, and large-area sonar imaging systems with much higher resolutions (a fabric woven from acoustic fibers would provide the equivalent of millions of tiny acoustic sensors).
[ via PhysOrg ]