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January 30, 2021 07:00 am

Surround Sound From Lightweight Roll-To-Roll Printed Loudspeaker Paper

"Researchers from the fields of print media technology, chemistry, physics, acoustics, electrical engineering, and economics from six nations developed a continuous, highly productive, and reliable roll production of loudspeaker webs," reports project manager Georg C. Schmidt. [For those unfamiliar with roll-to-roll processing, it is the process of creating electronic devices on a roll of flexible plastic or metal foil, which, among other things, reduces manufacturing cost.] This is an improvement upon the 2015 T-Book -- a large-format illustrated book equipped with printed electronics that outputs sound through a speaker invisibly located inside the sheet of paper. "The T-Book was and is a milestone in the development of printed electronics, but development is continuing all the time," says Prof. Dr. Arved C. Hubler, under whose leadership this technology trend has been driven forward for more than 20 years. Phys.Org reports: Not only did they use the roll-to-roll (R2R) printing process for this, but they also developed inline technologies for other process steps, such as the lamination of functional layers. "This allows electronics to be embedded in the paper -- invisibly and protected," says Hubler. In addition, he says, inline polarization of piezoelectric polymer layers has been achieved for the first time and complete inline process monitoring of the printed functional layers is possible. The final project results were published in the renowned journal Advanced Materials. The potential of loudspeaker paper was extended to other areas of application in the T-Paper project. For example, meter-long loudspeaker installations can now be manufactured in web form or as a circle (T-RING). "In our T-RING prototype, an almost four-meter-long track with 56 individual loudspeakers was connected to form seven segments and shaped into a circle, making a 360-degree surround sound installation possible," says Schmidt. The speaker track, including printed circuitry, weighs just 150 grams and consists of 90 percent conventional paper that can be printed in color on both sides. "This means that low-cost infotainment solutions are now possible in museums, at trade shows and in the advertising industry, for example. In public buildings, for example, very homogeneous sound reinforcement of long stretches such as corridors is possible. But the process technology itself could also become interesting for other areas, such as the production of inline measurement systems for Industry 4.0," says the project manager, looking to the future.

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