Flexible, Stretchable, Transparent Carbon Nanotube Thin Film Loudspeakers
3 November 2008, 13:41
Categories: nanotubes-wires-fullerenes
A Chinese research team has moved a step closer to realizing flat speakers that will be much cheaper than the existing ones, for they have found that sheets made of carbon nanotubes behave like a loudspeaker when zapped with a varying electric current.
Shoushan Fan and his colleagues at Tsinghua University and Beijing Normal University have created a thin sheet by roughly aligning many 10-nanometer-diameter carbon nanotubes. Upon sending an audio frequency current through the sheet, the researchers found that it acted as a loudspeaker.
Fan thinks that the nanotube speaker functions as a thermoacoustic device. He says when an alternating current passes through it, the nanotube sheet alternates between room temperature and 80ºC, and such rapid temperature oscillations lead to pressure oscillations in the air next to the film.
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