Belinda Smith

speaker

2,605 appearances 27 recordings 4 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 2d ago

Belinda Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 27 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 6.

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The Science Show · Getting more from fertiliser, viral DNA's vital role and help from hookworms! · 17 Apr 2026 podcast

So imagine if you have in the future cities, you have these next generation devices embedded in the road, and it could tell you traffic conditions, it can tell you the weight of a car, it can tell you how many cars are passing over, and it's all in a self-powered way.

So there's no need for external batteries.

It'll give you direct information continuously and for a long period of time.

So smart infrastructure is one way, and we're keen to look into that and develop that further.

And then the second way is to enhance its piezoelectric performance.

So to maximise beyond just sensing how much energy it can actually produce.

So imagine ideally you have it embedded in roads, but it's also charging the streetlights.

It's also powering other things alongside the road.

The possibility is endless, but you need to further enhance its piezoelectric abilities to get that kind of performance.

So how do you go about scaling something like this up?

That's what myself and my colleagues are currently working on.

I wonder, could you use it on a smaller scale, like for charging devices?

If you think about your phone and how often that dies on you and you've forgotten to charge your phone and you wake up, it's a 0%.

Imagine if you had a nylon film over your phone, like a protective case covering.

It's very robust.

It's very strong.

And as you're tapping on that phone during the day, as it's moving around in your pocket, that ambient passive motion could be used to charge your phone.

So instead of ending up with 0% battery, ideally, it could always be at 100%.

We're way away from that, but that's the ideal.

You know, right now I could add a few percent potentially over the course of a day, but the next steps could be like 10%, 20%, 30%, or forgetting about charging altogether.

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