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this one is pretty funky
extract from an article at
zdnet australia
Future tech
By Steve Turvey
20 January 2004
Here’s another little gem I discovered: "dialectic elastomers"--the technology itself is not that new but some of the uses are quite clever. It’s a plastic that can expand or contract by up to 400 percent when an electric current is supplied to it. A simple application is to sandwich a thin layer of the elastomer between layers of a flexible graphite medium; in essence you have a flexible capacitor. Imagine a flat sheet of the material: when a current is supplied to the top and bottom of the sheet it stretches out horizontally. There are endless uses for such a material--perhaps one of the more obvious is as artificial "muscles" for either medical or robotic applications where the sheet is rolled into a tubular muscle.
One slightly less obvious use of the material is to reverse the application, mechanically stretching the material generates an electric current so some bright spark, no pun intended, came up with the idea of installing the material in the heel of shoes so as you walk the impact deforms the material and generates power. This application is transparent to the wearer of the shoes so the act of walking or running is no more difficult but will be able to generate enough electrical power to say charge their mobile phone or PDA batteries.
Steve Turvey is Lab Manager of the RMIT IT Test Labs
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Gee, does that beat me? I only got two pair - two aces, and another two.
[ This Message was edited by: gelfen on 2004-01-20 05:52 ]
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Posted: 2004-01-20 06:41:02
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The possibilities are unlimited!
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Posted: 2004-01-20 09:03:08
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