Electric Skin

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It's weatherproof, as flexible as paper, can generate electricity, serve as a microphone or radio speaker, sense your presence, act like a sponge, and has some abilities that are like human skin. What could this strange material be? It's a plastic called PVDF.

PVDF has so many amazing abilities that one scientist remarked, "God was good to us." Those automobile stickers saying, "unleaded fuel only" are made of PVDF. It has also been used to coat skyscraper surfaces to protect them from the weather. If you attach a few wires to the film, it will serve as a microphone. Or if you attach a speaker wire to it, it will serve as a speaker. It can sense weight, movement and infrared radiation. When bent, it generates electricity. If 220 tons of the material was formed into sheets that can be moved by sea waves, it would generate one megawatt of electricity.

It is this ability to generate electricity that makes it like your skin. Human skin and PVDF both act like an electric sponge. When you push on the sponge, electricity flows out just like water. When you release pressure on the sponge, electricity flows back in, just as water is soaked up by a sponge. Not only does this help us feel things on our skin, but also PVDF can be used in the same way to give machines the ability to feel things they touch.

The abilities of PVDF are amazing scientists. Yet its abilities are much less significant than the abilities of the skin that God has given us.