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Groundbreaking Research Behind Engineering Photography Competition

View the winning entries of the 2012 Photography Competition at the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering, which was sponsored by optical systems manufacturer Carl Zeiss, and learn about the fascinating stories behind them. The images offer a glimpse into the research done in a wide array of fields at the University of Cambridge, encompassing applications that range from new adhesives and inkjet printing techniques through to the development of replacement human tissues.

Topics:
Coatings & Adhesives Composites Computers Diagnostics Electronics & Computers Imaging Materials Medical Nanotechnology Optics Photonics Plastics Visualization Software

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:05 when we first started this competition we thought it was just going to be a little bit of fun but actually it's turned out to be much more than this it's turned out to be a showcase for what modern engineering is really about it shows all of the work that our staff and students do here within the department and it's an integrated engineering department the largest in

    00:00:22 the country and that means that there's a tremendous range of activities going on from all different scales right from the tiniest atom scale engineering right through to the engineering of some of the world's biggest civil engineered structures behind each image there's a fascinating story which talks about modern engineering and these stories really

    00:00:43 show the dedication of our young researchers and students who have been working away on an area of mathematics and science and taking it through engineering into applications and that's been fantastic so that not only are we exciting people with this photography competition but we're also telling them something important about engineering and its role in

    00:01:05 society so we received hundreds of photographs submitted by our staff and students they're all very high quality they all catch the eye but when we were trying to choose the winners perhaps our first criteria of thinking pretty ambitiously we were thinking which one of these images could hang in the tape modern or the tape Britain and be accepted as a work of art

    00:01:33 this image was taken with an optical microscope and it shows a dried and cracked film of a waxy material called alky ketin dier or akd and it's spread over a glass microscope slide the orange and brown areas you see are akd and the white lines are the cracks that have formed during drying this material is widely used in industry to treat paper and reduce its

    00:01:58 ability to absorb water improving our quality of printing and writing my name is Ronan Daly and I work with Alfonso castron Pita in the inket research center in the department of engineering here at Cambridge University we study inket Technologies and there are potential applications in a broad range of fields from 3D printing to Medical Diagnostic

    00:02:21 devices akd is one of many materials we're exploring that may change the wetability of other surfaces such as Plastics wetability is important in microfluidics where we want to control the flow of very small volumes of liquid to make medical diagnostic devices while this image may only be one of many steps in this experiment when we see such beautiful natural phenomena it

    00:02:45 always makes the work more exciting and motivating my name is Graeme tce and I'm an engineer working on medical imaging I'm particularly interested in how Engineers can contribute to clinical problems what you're looking at here for example is a computer generated image derived from a clinical medical CT scan of the head what it shows with remarkable Precision is the thickness of

    00:03:11 the outer bone layer of the skull surface known as the cortex the areas that appear in pink show regions of the skull where the bone is less than half a millim thick the dark blue areas are more than 4 mm thick these Imaging techniques provide clinicians and others with a new way of looking at the C the three images here illustrate the

    00:03:33 remarkable symmetry in the skull in the case of this individual you can also see some asymmetry just above the eye socket at the location of a past injury these same techniques are also being used to look at other bones in the body such as the hip and spine to find out whether these bones are at risk of [Music] fracture adhesive tapes are

    00:03:56 indispensable in our everyday lives however when there used repeatedly they become less sticky and lose their effectiveness in contrast geckos and other creatures have feet with ability both to stick to things and to peel off and this ability is not affected by the repeatable use I am Paula Goldberg Oppenheimer and work in the field of interdisciplinary research focus on

    00:04:19 combining soft materials such as polymers and hard materials such as carbon nanot tubes and graphine for creating composite and hybrid structures with Advanced properties and applications my research aims to mimic the intricate structure and super adhesive properties of a geckos food by transferring carbon nanot tubes on polymer micrometer size pillars very

    00:04:39 thin nanoscale structures with the walls formed by a one atom thick sheets of carbon are rolled into a tube like shape and transferred on top of columnlike structures with Dimensions smaller than an individual hair one way of making a micro structure is to sandwich a polymer film between two electrodes and a small voltage between them the resulting High electric field and buildup of

    00:05:04 electrostatic pressure destabilizes the film which develops undulations leading to the micr structured morphology things don't always go according to plan and the image you're looking at shows what happens when the experimental device is not quite correctly assembled fractal instabilities have formed due to one of the electrodes coming into contact with the polymer film and trapping air which

    00:05:27 compressed and subsequently expanded into fingers hi my name is chin Teno this image is taken from research I Carri out with my colleague Daniel shange under supervision of Dr Michelle oen we are interested in fibers materials because they have been considered as replacements for various tissues including cartilage and skin this image

    00:05:53 shows the micro structure of a fibrous polymer scuffle the structure consists of a random network with micrometer size fibus the beauty of this structure is that it mimics the architecture of natureal tissues the method we use to produce this scuffle is an electrod spinning technique in this technique we apply the very high voltage to pull verifi polymer fibers from the solution

    00:06:23 we are interested to know how the micr structure of this material affects its mechanical Behavior such understanding allows us to reproduce the mechanical characteristics of natureal tissues leading to better and more robust tissue replacements