Printed sensors may warn when to change your car tyres

New York : Engineers in the US have invented an inexpensive printed sensor that can monitor the tread of car tyres in real time, warning drivers when the rubber meeting the road has grown dangerously thin.

"With all of the technology and sensors that are in today's cars, it's kind of crazy to think that there's almost no data being gathered from the only part of the vehicle that is actually touching the road," said Aaron Franklin, Associate Professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. "Our tyre tread sensor is the perfect marriage between high-end technology and a simple solution," Franklin said.

In collaboration with Fetch Automotive Design Group, the researchers demonstrated a design using metallic carbon nanotubes (tiny cylinders of carbon atoms just one-billionth of a meter in diameter) that can track millimetre-scale changes in tread depth with 99 per cent accuracy.

The technology relies on the well understood mechanics of how electric fields interact with metallic conductors.