Mobile phones come alive with the sound of music

Last year, Dr Joe Briscoe and Dr Steve Dunn from QMUL’s School of Engineering and Materials Science found that playing pop and rock music improves the performance of solar cells, in research published in the journal Advanced Materials with Imperial College London.

 

Developing this research further, Nokia worked with the QMUL team to create an energy-harvesting prototype (a nanogenerator) that could be used to charge a mobile phone using everyday background noise – such as traffic, music, and our own voices.

 

The team used the key properties of zinc oxide, a material that when squashed or stretched creates a voltage by converting energy from motion into electrical energy, in the form of nanorods.