MIT researchers have demonstrated that they can manufacture acoustic fibers with flat surfaces, like those shown here, as well as fibers with circular cross sections. The flat fibers could prove particularly useful in acoustic imaging devices.
For centuries, “man-made fibers” meant the raw stuff of clothes and ropes; in the information age, it’s come to mean the filaments of glass that carry data in communications networks. But to Yoel Fink, an Associate professor of Materials Science and principal investigator at MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics, the threads used in textiles and even optical fibers are much too passive. For the past decade, his lab has been working to develop fibers with ever more sophisticated properties, to enable fabrics that can interact with their environment.
Continue reading… “Fibers That Can Hear and Sing: Fibers Created That Detect and Produce Sound”
