Tails from the nozzle bank
Dr Steve Hoath
The winning image in the Epson Photography Competition recently held at the Department of Engineering, was taken by Dr Steve Hoath, a Research Associate working with the Director of the Inkjet Research Centre, Dr Graham Martin, at the Institute for Manufacturing. Steve will receive the first prize of an Epson Stylus Photo R2400 top of the range professional photo printer that has been generously donated by Epson.
The photo was taken with a Nikon D70 with a Navitar zoom macro lens and a very short flash duration (20 ns) light source. This image was taken during a series of experiments at the Department's Inkjet Research Centre investigating the performance of inkjet printers. It shows ink drops emerging from a bank of inkjet nozzles (just visible at the bottom of the picture). The image is about 2.3 mm across, the drop heads are 50 microns across and the tails are less than 10 microns wide (10 times thinner than a human hair). The drops are moving at around 6 m/s hence the need for a very short flash to freeze the motion. The drops are in three groups with slightly different drop firing times. In some cases the drops are still attached to the nozzles by long ligaments of stretching liquid. Other drops show separation and the formation of smaller, �satellite� drops from the collapsing ligaments. This image was adjusted for brightness and contrast and rotated for effect.
2004 winning photo
Owlstone Photography Competition
This year's photography competition, open to all staff and students in the Department, is sponsored by Owlstone. Owlstone, a company at the forefront of nanotechnology, which was spun out of the Department's research by co-founders Andrew Koehl, David Ruiz-Alonso and Billy Boyle, have kindly donated an iPod nano as the prize for this year's winning photograph.
Completely remastered, the new iPod nano 8GB model can carry around 2000 tunes, comes in five different colours, has a a 1.5-inch colour display, can hold up to 25,000 photos, can play audiobooks and podcasts, 24 hours of battery life and retails at around �170.
The winning photograph will feature on the Department's website, newsletter, plasma screen, posters and more.
Previous years' winners have received national and international press coverage for their winning photographs.
We are searching for an image that relates to research or teaching in the Department or engineers out in the field, which may be beautiful, fascinating, intriguing, amusing, or possibly all of these things.
We will use a very high proportion of the entries in a web gallery and throughout the website, and an exhibition in the Baker building foyer, giving acknowledgements wherever they are used.
The panel of judges include: Billy Boyle (Co-Founder and President Owlstone), Roberto Cipolla (Professor of Information Engineering), Dr Allan McRobie, Professor Keith Glover (Head of Department), and Philip Guildford (Director of Research).
