Megaultraphone funded by Ingenio Explora 2010

The Ingenio Explora program from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Educación is devoted to funding new breakthrough, heterodox and risky ideas that face already established results in a given scientific field. The project “Megaultraphone” from the CTMedia, which aims at developing a new class of megaphones based on the combination of conventional horns with ultrasound technology, has been selected by Ingenio Explora as one of the ideas worth investigating for year 2011. The project will be led by CTMedia researcher Dr. Oriol Guasch and it is strongly connected to the work of one of ours PhD students, Umut Sayin. Megaultraphone will benefit from the nonlinear propagation effects of ultrasounds, which allow generating strongly focused audio spotlights in the audible range, to build a new class of high performance megaphones. The latter will have several advantages when compared to conventional ones, such as a strong directivity, that will make them useful for emitting messages or security warnings exclusively directed to individuals.