 Hello, my name is Dr Peter Harrop, I'm Chairman of ID TechX and we're going to do something slightly bizarre. We're going to have me, someone from London, interviewing someone else from London, here in California. And that's because we chase the technology, not the origin of the person. I have the honour of talking today to Marcus Taylor and he is from a company Silent Sensors and there are a number of technologies we wish to explore in this. The move to structural electronics is a strong trend at our show here at the ID TechX show and this is a part of that. There is an element of Internet of Things of course and there is also an element of energy harvesting which is coming back in very different forms, it's being reinvented. So I'm going to touch on all those because this particular company is involved in all of those. So first of all why the name Silent Sensors? It was an idea that came up about three years ago and it stuck. The idea was basically that there's a lot of chatter going on but we don't hear it. But you've got Wi-Fi, you've got Bluetooth, you've got GSM. It's going on all around us right now, but it's silent. Yeah that's very true. So you're involved in structural electronics in the sense of making amazingly a UHF tag that's suitable for going in a tyre. Can you show us this? Tell us about this. Yes, so the tyre and the elastomer market in general is we started looking at it from the point of flexibility so this is a material that's flexible but it's not stretchable. You can't do that to it whereas this material we can stretch it and that deformation is something that we can accommodate with the inks that we have developed that we can print onto here and then surface mount the RFID tag on there. So it's very much a material science problem and mechanical engineering problem where we've had to work with the tyre engineers who have now learned together with us what the requirements of electronics are and then there's also the antenna design because rubber has a dielectric constant that we have to then so we have to design the antenna to be detuned so that it tunes itself when we apply it to the antenna and then this then these are actually although they look the same they're actually two different types of rubber and so each of these require slightly different treatments and so on. So the form factors we can either do an inlay and that's where the focus is making it compatible with a vulcanization process so the components also need to survive 165 Celsius for 20-30 minutes max sometimes less depending on if it's a truck tyre or an aircraft tyre but not a wheelbarrow tyre because the mass is a lot lower so the and the whole why have we got traceability in tyres well at the the end of the day it's the trend we see in all industries which is moving towards tyre or as a service business models so if you've got unit level identification and traceability then you have the enabler for that kind of business model which you wouldn't have otherwise because today the tyre is typically marked with a batch code and a serial number but it's very labor intensive and difficult so if we look at it from a total cost of ownership model the tyre the RFID tag if we don't if we don't just look at the bill of materials but also look at the whole lifespan of the tyre then this facilitates that track and trace that is important safety remolds all the rest yes I heard years ago that there was a stage where a tyre through its life can have seven or more barcodes put on it and they get damaged they get disoriented and it's not really a clever way to go so that would be great progress are you involved in adding power to that yeah so the sort of the evolution of this and this is an early prototype I haven't got the latest versions because they are a little bit proprietary but this shows how you can use off-the-shelf components to develop a system to prototype and this is a self-powered tyre pressure monitoring system so you've got a TPMS standard off-the-shelf TPMS trip there you've got a super oh sorry a capacitor there for storing the energy and that's just a capacitor yeah and then then you've got a rectification circuit and this is the the bus bars to connect the piezoelectric material so and that then is capable of producing enough power to run the sensor long enough for it to then effectively replace the TPMS sensor that today sits in the rim or on the valve stem of a wheel assembly I mean the problem of TPMS has got easier in the sense that as electronics develops it always needs less electricity that's good but traditionally with piezoelectric energy harvesting various people went into it and then came out of it like micro strain and others and there were problems not just with reliability but with more seriously with trying to get wide bandgap because vibrations have an irritating habit of not being the frequency you want or the jump about and you're one minute it's working next minute isn't working and traditionally with piezoelectric would say ceramics you have the issue of when you try to get wide acoustic bandwidth then it comes on reliable because you go into tension or something are you doing anything there to get wide bandwidth yeah so we're we're using our know-how in printed electronics with this silver but we can also put PZT materials into here and find an optimum between get the right densification and also the amount of material that we need to deposit so it's really a trilemma that was solving between the energy harvesting the storage and the power management in fact our neighbor here is helped as enormously with low power power management I see that combined with the super the pseudo capacitor that we're developing here which is solid state so that it's all about getting those three components working well together and the the other thing is to also add storage here so that we we need a rechargeable battery and a super capacitor to cover the the whole range of use cases so that comes along to the ride with any super bastard but to maximize it you usually need an aqueous electrolyte and something like graphene carbon nanotubes or something is that what you're doing no so this is this is solid state and if you like the formula is a little bit proprietary but it is a lithium-based cathode and then we have a solid state electrolyte and and it's proved to be very efficient and we've got some data that we can I can share with you but it is sufficient to address the requirement that we need and we have a whole roadmap to increase the reduce the size and increase the density about yeah combination of battery and super correct yeah do you know the energy density or anything of that I haven't got the figure in my head right now but it is it is sufficient to be a replacement yeah that's great but you're not going broadband acoustically you're intending that you choose a particular frequency and classically you get almost nothing off of that away from that frequency it's very sharp peak with yeah so is that right but you believe that particular frequency will be available or sign perfectly and we can run it at different speeds and so on as well you're on PZT yeah and you might move to PVDF or something or not so PVDF unfortunately has a characteristic that doesn't like high temperatures so it is something that we're exploring with other materials and we've also had some discussions about the opportunity to use lithium niobate as well as an alternative but that correct yeah and and there are other solutions that we're looking at but we've got enough of a of a starting point now to go to the if you like the next stage of development and how many of you are there how big is the business in total including our JV there's 14 of us and we're distributed between Sedgefield in the north that CPI and down south that in Swindon and we're now looking to consolidate that so we're we're in a fundraising mode so if there's anyone out there they would like 14 14 one good excellent and when you talk about silent energy on one visiting card what's that mean so that's our joint venture focusing on the development of the supercapacitor so we wanted to split the two so that we we had a team that focused on the development of this well I think the fact that we focused on tyres is a actually very narrow segment of a very big industry which I guess you'd call rubber elastomers and and that is is a as a market that I think in general you could say is under service by the IO industrial IoT market because of the challenging manufacturing processes that you have to address but if you look at if you look at any system whether it be a tire or a gasket or a seal none of the systems that we need in modern civilization would exist without these these very valuable materials so and it also is an area which one question so we've found for example that a bit a little bit like the clock radio by combining a clock and a radio you create a new product set and by looking at seals and gaskets as an opportunity for combining a temperature sensor with a seal so you have those dual functions you you have a whole new whole new opportunity to optimize in many respects because you then can have more temperature sensors around the system whereas at the moment you're sort of looking at the average in the sample and the other thing that's interesting of course if we look at the vehicle industry electric vehicles as opposed to internal combustion engine vehicles have the same problem or have the same problem they need coolant in fact bulk batteries they don't like huge changes in temperature so the cooling system becomes even more critical even compared to a internal combustion engine I'm sure we've all at some point cooked an engine but it still keeps running whereas you're not going to do that with an electric vehicle once you've cooked the battery that's pretty much it yeah so interestingly electric vehicles need more rubber hoses in a sense than an electric and then an internal combustion engine as an as an aside how fascinating that's very interesting and what you're doing here is an electric so you happen to have made a sensor you have as well if it can function in both ways but we're only looking at it as an energy harvesting device how much power comes out of it? well we depending on how much area we're using we can go from hundreds of microwatts to milliwatts so milliwatts would be critical size or something? quite big you you can also stack them and what we we haven't really explored that in much detail yet because of course as you laminate them they become more rigid and finding the optimum mechanical area there is difficult so the next stage for us is really to start modeling everything that we've learned empirically and and creating more of a kind of data model that that we can use to do the design work together with the mechanical engineers and so on before we go to a lot of expensive making things thank you very much fascinating story wonderful company obviously going to go well definitely should be invested in thank you and we wish you well and we're going to come back and follow your story in the years to come thank you for your time there was one aside I was going to say Peter that it was thanks to ID TechX that we met we met them in Berlin 18 months ago and thanks to them we managed to create a J-vine and I was actually in Moscow only two weeks ago at the British Embassy where we signed the agreement with the Prince Michael of Kent so in this business it's global isn't it and you have to get going and visit and learn things I last week visited someone in Ohio who'd heard me talking North Finland the week before so it goes on but anyway you can run but you can't hide but no that's lovely so wonderful to meet you and really fascinating technology we love the technology it's good thank you very much indeed thank you very much