Belinda Smith

Slightly more rigid, but yeah, that just feels like plastic to me.

Yeah, I mean, when you look at it at the surface, you're like, this is nothing special.

But when you use it in the way that we've shown it to be used, like, for example, running it over with a car, it works.

It produces electricity.

Okay, well, before we get into why you might want to run over it with a car...

You have a new method of making piezoelectric nylon, which involves electrical fields and vibrations.

And together that creates these mini molecular batteries you mentioned before and arranges them stacked neatly so that when you bend it, it can generate electricity.

Yeah.

Okay, so tell me, why have you been driving cars over this nylon material?

There's two ways we can look at using this, and that's either to harvest energy or for sensing.

For example, like embedded in our roads.

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.