Fujifilm reinvents the speaker.

Fujifilm, a company known to everyone in the field of photography, unveiled this technology called “Beat” at the Nano Tech 2013 exhibition held in Tokyo in early February, where several examples of roll-shaped speakers from fan, ultra thin panel…

To accomplish this technical feat, Fujifilm engineers had to find a way to conceive of a material that is flexible enough to be folded and rolled, while still being rigid enough not to absorb the vibration produced by sound.. To do this, it used an elastic and viscous polymer capable of withstanding this double requirement.

In the Fujifilm-created membrane, the polymer becomes viscous when operated in the audible range of 20Hz to 20kHz and becomes elastic when folded.

To produce sound, Fujifilm mixed the polymer with a piezoelectric ceramic. Piezoelectricity is a phenomenon presented by certain crystals that, when subjected to mechanical stresses, acquire an electrical polarization in their mass, with a potential difference and electrical charges appearing on their surface.

Fujifilm mixed the polymer with electrode pierced piezoelectric ceramic. The whole was covered with a protective layer. When voltage is applied to the electrodes, the piezoelectric ceramic vibrates and the viscoelastic polymer resonates like a membrane.

Invent the Flexible Speaker

The sound is not distorted even when the film is folded or wound, because the elasticity depends on the frequency. "When the ceramic vibrates in the audible range of 20Hz to 20kHz, the vibration energy is transmitted to the entire surface of the film, " explains an engineer at the firm.