Belinda Smith

So if you look at the fundamentals of what that means, imagine you have a bulk material that you squeeze.

Inside the molecular layers within that arrangement of atoms, as you squeeze it, you end up getting a positive and a negative areas of charge.

So you get charge separation.

What that means is that you will get a mini battery.

Are there any piezoelectric materials that are used today?

If you look at, for example, your barbecue lighters and those igniters, when you tap that, a flick that you hear on that crystal is actually a flick on a piezoelectric crystal.

And so you flick it, it makes a little spark, and then as that gas comes out, it ignites.

The problem with these kind of igniters and why we look at specifically nylon is that they're ceramics.

They're brittle crystals.

So when we look at our applications, we want something that's going to last forever.

Nylon ends up sticking out because it's durable.

It's a commodity polymer.

It's all around us.

People know about nylon.

It's in ropes.

People hang and their lives are literally by a thread of nylon.

So people believe in that material.

It's in spacesuits.

It's something that's useful.

And there's recent literature out there to show that it has biodegradable pathways.