The MIT MediaLab announced yesterday that its researchers invented a battery-free underwater piezoelectric sensor that can transmit data by absorbing or reflecting sound waves back to a receiver and can simultaneously store energy. The sensor is an alternative to underwater communication: the latter relies on sound waves, and uses a lot of power, draining energy from ocean sensors, meaning that exploration of the oceans can be difficult; this technology can instead explore without a battery.
The sensors are made with a material that transforms pressure waves into electricity using piezoelectricity. As sound hits the sensor, pressure waves make it vibrate, and the vibration generates electricity that powers up the sensor. Electricity can also be transformed back into sound waves by the piezoelectric material (this communication technique is commonly used for RFID tags and transmits data by reflecting modulated wireless signals off a tag and back to a reader). The sensors communicate using binary, like computers - a reflected wave decodes a 1 bit and an absorbed wave decodes a 0 bit.
"Once you have a way to transmit 1s and 0s, you can send any information," states in a press release the co-author of the study Fadel Adib, an assistant professor in the MIT Media Lab and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and founding director of the Signal Kinetics Research Group. "Basically, we can communicate with underwater sensors based solely on the incoming sound signals whose energy we are harvesting."
This is the first time piezoelectric crystals were used not just to harvest energy, but also as a radio.
The sensors have been so far used to measure underwater temperature and pressure, measurements that can help researchers understanding underwater climate change and predict the rise in sea levels.
This network of interconnected sensors that send data to the surface is therefore a way to take the pulse of the ocean, explains a video by the MIT MediaLab. Yet the system could also be used in space missions (for example on the subsurface ocean on Saturn's largest moon, Titan) or to investigate the vastly unexplored oceans covering most our planet, tracking marine life over long periods.
The Piezo-Acoustic Backscatter System will be presented in Beijing, China, at the SIGCOMM conference this week, in a paper that has won the conference's "Best Paper" award. Adib's research on the sensor was inspired by the nature documentary series "Blue Planet," that highlights that, as oceans cover about 72 percent of Earth's surface, vast parts of them remain unexplored. Adib set therefore about finding a way to create battery free sensors to avoid pollution.
But how can long-term deep-sea sensing for extreme environments inspire art or fashion projects? Such news, you may argue, may be of interest to environmental scientists rather than to designers.
Well, the sensor inspires researches in marine biology and oceanography and, when we think about such fields or about the vast unexplored underwater realm, our minds immediately conjure up something ethereal, immaterial and almost impalpable, adjectives that go well with the work of Mariko Kusumoto.
Born in Kumamoto, Japan, and based in Massachusetts, the Japanese artist is first and foremost a metalsmith, but she recently started experimenting with textiles.
In the last few years she mainly developed pieces with thin gossamer fabric, creating sculptures or jewellery pieces inspired by deep sea creatures.
To set the fabric into complex geometrical shapes and configurations Kusumoto uses a heat-setting technique: the material memorises the shapes that are then employed for wearable 3D jewellery or interior design objects.
Kusumoto creates with this technique sea anemones or sea urchin-like shapes or transparent spheres that contain little fabric objects and blossoming flowers (she makes smaller versions of these pieces for her rings, brooches or bracelets).
Jean Paul Gaultier recently used some of Kusumoto's smaller pieces such as brooches to punctuate his Haute Couture S/S 2019 collection.
While it is not rare to spot Kusumoto's work in books about fibre art and wearable art, her pieces have also appeared on magazines dedicated to aquatic sports and diving, proving there is a strong connection between her inspirations and the mysteries of the vastly unexplored underwater realm. Hopefully she will experiment more along this line in future, maybe also thanks to new discoveries done by state-of-the-art sensors.
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