During a trade show in Japan, Fujifilm unveiled new bendable speakers. The company presented several interesting prototypes, showing how these speakers can be made in all sorts of shapes:
Making a bendable diaphragm is not easy. Soft materials absorb vibrations so it's difficult to make one that's flexible and have good acoustic performance. Fujifilm managed to achieve that by using viscoelastic polymer that hardens in the audible range (20Hz to 20kHz) and softens in the range for bending it by hand (several hertz). This polymer was mixed with piezoelectric ceramics, coated with an unspecified layer for protected and then sandwitched with electrodes. The piezoelectric ceramics vibrates when voltage is applited and the viscoelastic polymer functions as a diaphragm.
We do not know how close if Fujiflim to commercialize this technology. But this is yet another step towards flexible devices. In the past year we've seen advances in flexible displays, flexible batteries and flexible memory devices. Now we also have a flexible speaker...
