Saturday 16 April 2011

Ink with tin nanoparticles could print future circuit boards

Ink with tin nanoparticles could print future circuit boards

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This image, taken with a transmission electron microscope, shows 29.1-nm nanoparticles that were used to make conductive ink. Image credit: Yun Hwan Jo, et al. ©2011 IOP Publishing Ltd.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Almost all electronic devices contain printed circuit boards, which are patterned with an intricate copper design that guides electricity to make the devices functional. In a new study, researchers have taken steps toward fabricating circuit boards with an inkjet printer. They have synthesized tin (Sn) nanoparticles and then added them to the ink to increase its conductivity, leading to an improved way to print circuit boards.

The researchers, from KAIST and the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials, both in Daejoen, South Korea, have published their study on using tin in highly conductive ink in a recent issue of Nanotechnology.

Currently, most circuit boards are printed using multi-step methods such as conventional vacuum deposition and photolithographic patterning. However, these methods have disadvantages since they require a high processing temperature, involve toxic waste, and are expensive. Fabricating circuit boards using inkjet printing overcomes these limitations, and in comparison to the other methods is fast, simple, and inexpensive. Inkjet printing could be used for a variety of devices, such as RFID tags, LEDs, , organic thin-film transistors, and biomedical devices.

Recently, several studies have investigated different materials, such as polymers, carbon nanotubes, and metal nanoparticles, which could be used for the conductive ink. Although polymers and carbon nanotubes have advantages for printing on flexible displays, their is too low for them to be used for conductive ink materials. have higher conductivity, and so are more suitable for conductive ink materials.

“The greatest significance of our work is that it is the first attempt to print conductive patterns with the Sn-containing conductive ink,” coauthor Yun Hwan Jo of KAIST told PhysOrg.com. “Several papers reported the synthesis of Sn nanoparticles for interconnection materials. However, no obvious melting temperature depression was observed due to the relatively large size and low uniformity of the Sn nanoparticles. In addition, there has been no report for fabricating conductive ink with Sn nanoparticles.”

In their study, Jo and coauthors synthesized a large amount of uniformly sized tin nanoparticles. As they explained, synthesizing tin nanoparticles that have a very small size is important because it leads to a lower melting temperature compared to that of bulk tin. For instance, while bulk tin melts at 232 °C, tin nanoparticles with a diameter of 11.3 nm melt at 177 °C. A lower melting temperature is beneficial because it means lower energy consumption, less substrate warping, and fewer thermal stress problems. The researchers also applied surface treatments to the conductive ink to decrease the resistance by a factor of 20.

“Two factors, cost and low temperature, are the advantages of the Sn-containing conductive ink,” Jo said. “Ag, Cu and Au nanoparticles are widely used to fabricate conductive ink. However, Au and Ag are expensive. And the melting temperature of Ag, Cu and Au nanoparticles is higher than that of Sn nanoparticles (177.3 °C, this experiment).”

By adding the tin nanoparticles to an ink solution, the researchers printed patterns of highly conductive ink from an . As the first demonstration of inkjet printing with tin nanoparticles, the results show that the new technique looks promising for printing various that require conductive patterns.

“We are under study to fabricate conductive lines with conductive Sn ink via inkjet printing for flexible OLED devices,” Jo said. “We are optimizing the jetting conditions to draw complicated patterns using conductive Sn ink.”

More information: Yun Hwan Jo, et al. “Synthesis and characterization of low temperature Sn nanoparticles for the fabrication of highly conductive ink.” Nanotechnology 22 (2011) 225701 (8pp). DOI: 10.1088/0957-4484/22/22/225701

Copyright 2010 PhysOrg.com.
All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or part without the express written permission of PhysOrg.com.

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Can marine life adapt to global change?

Can marine life adapt to global change?

A team of researchers from the University of Plymouth, the Marine Biological Association of the UK and the Plymouth Marine Laboratory have conducted an exciting new study looking into the potential effect of climate change on marine life, and how marine animals may be able to adapt to future environmental scenarios.

Increasing anthropogenic (man-made) (CO2) emissions over the last two centuries have led to a warming of the Earth’s atmosphere and a subsequent rise in sea surface temperatures.

In addition, around one third of this extra CO2 has now entered the planet’s oceans causing the seawater chemistry to change, a process called “Ocean Acidification”. These effects are predicted to worsen over the next few decades.

Consequently this recent study, led by Drs Piero Calosi and John Bishop, has looked at the potential impacts on sea life should the temperature and acidity of the oceans increase as is predicted to occur in the near and more distant future. It also investigated whether species have the genetic potential to adapt to the rapid changes currently occurring within the marine environment.

Dr. Calosi, from the Marine Biology and Ecology Research Center of the University of Plymouth, said: “Ours is the first study showing that may already possess genetic variation that will enable future adaptation, via natural selection, to falling pH and rising temperature.”

Their investigation focused on characterising growth and reproductive responses of different genetic individuals of a marine organism, to test the idea that some possess distinct responses to environmental changes.

Researcher Jennifer Pistevos said: “This is the first experiment comparing the responses of different genotypes of a marine animal to warming and ocean acidification scenarios predicted to occur in the years 2100 and 2300.”

Explaining the methodology, Dr. John Bishop, from the Marine Biological Association of the UK in Plymouth, added: “This was possible by using the bryozoan (sea mat) Celleporella hyalina, a colonial organism which grows by the addition of small male, female and feeding modules.

“Cuttings were taken from four original colonies to provide physically separate, but genetically identical, sub-colonies of each to use in the experiment.”

Overall, decreasing pH and increasing temperature caused a reduction in growth, with growth stopping all together at the highest temperature. In addition, colonies responded to decreasing pH by increasing their reproductive investment, specifically producing more males. This was interpreted as ‘reproductive bailout’ in colonies threatened with imminent death, promoting the rapid acquisition of reproductive success via releasing sperm.

Further observation by scanning electron microscopy revealed surface pitting of the calcified surface of colonies that were exposed to increased acidity.

Dr. Steve Widdicombe, from the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, said: “With our study we have shown that the genetic individuals tested here possess substantially different responses in growth, reproductive investment and sex ratio to the exposure to temperature, acidity and these two factors combined.”

This study is therefore relevant in understanding the likely responses of marine calcifying organisms, like the sea mat studied, to changes in ocean acidity and temperature. However, Dr. Calosi said: “Whilst it is good news that marine animals may have the potential to adapt to future global change scenarios, we still do not know how those genotypes able to persist under such scenarios will cope with subsequent environmental challenges.”

More information: The study was recently published in the international journal Oikos. More information on the paper is available at http://onlinelibra … 0.x/abstract

Provided by University of Plymouth

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BBC - Norfolk - Entertainment - Colin Self: A Picture Of Norfolk

You are in: Norfolk > Entertainment > Arts, Film & Culture > Arts & Culture > Colin Self: A Picture Of Norfolk

Colin Self creating his Picture Of Norfolk

Colin Self paints his Picture Of Norfolk

Colin Self: A Picture Of Norfolk

Norfolk is the spiritual and visual inspiration for Colin Self - his recent art works have been particularly drawn from that landscape. We take the artist on a journey through his native county, exploring the effect it has had on his work.

Generations of artists have been captivated by Britain's countryside and, in turn, their images and words have influenced our impressions and bolstered a love of where we live.

In the BBC ONE series A Picture Of Britain, David Dimbleby traveled across the country to explore the connections between landscape, art and identity. The programme also highlighted the work of local artists from around Britain.

Colin Self was one of a handful of artists in the 1960s that pioneered the Pop Art movement.

More than 30 years ago he turned his back on the London art world and returned to his home country of Norfolk, where he still lives and works today. His paintings are strongly rooted in the area's landscapes, and are heavily influenced by the changing nature of Norfolk's countryside.

Eastern beginnings

Colin Self was born in Norwich in 1941 and went to Norwich School of Art before studying at the Slade in the early 1960s.

In his time at the Slade School, he met fellow artists David Hockney, and Peter Blake, who greatly admired Self's paintings.

His style was extremely influential when he and others such as Warhol, Lichtenstein and Segal, were at the forefront of the ‘Pop Art’ movement.

Colin visited the United States and Canada with David Hockney in 1962 and 1965, and was soon exhibiting widely on the international arts circuit.

By 1964 he was showing at the cutting edge Robert Fraser Gallery, and by 1968 Colin Self was producing technically groundbreaking prints with Editions Alecto.

Today he remains one of Britain's leading painters, with a distinctive style and strong opinions about the Norfolk environment he lives in.

East Anglian roots

Much of Colin Self's work is to do with his everyday experiences of nature and landscapes and he draws on his native Norfolk for inspiration in his paintings.

Colin Self

Colin Self

"Very much of my work is to do with common things and to do with nature - things from the everyday. And I get very, very much from what I call 'people's art'," he said. 

"The landscape in some ways is my visual script.

"Hidden in there behind the lie of the land is not only my past but the past of everyone, my future and my energy," he added.

Self owns an album of some of the earliest aerial photographs of Norwich taken in 1917.

For him they are a sharp reminder of the fast disappearing Norfolk landscape, and provide a creative catalyst for his paintings. They have triggered his imagination and this is reflected in Self's paintings of the Norfolk countryside.

Changing landscape

One of Self's biggest concerns is about what is happening to Norfolk's changing landscape, as forests are cut down and rural landscapes are altered beyond recognition.

He recalls the landscape of his youth when he would play for hours in the woods behind his parents' house, studying nature. Self is concerned that we're destroying the very nature that inspired him and others to paint.

"The countryside is needlessly violated," he said.

"I think if people were more conservationist-minded and I think if bureaucrats got out of offices more and actually got hands-on, they would see in a practical way how things could be run." 

Self is worried that these dramatic changes have not been for the better.

"These forests… are being gnawed back by the year," he said of the woodlands near where he lives.

"I think the chainsaw, in my view, has done far more damage than the gun…

"Where's the aesthetic?, where's the balance? Where is the harmonising with nature in that?

"The destruction and loss of environment is something that hurts me deeply," he added. 

Metropolitan-Norfolk man

Self's ancestors have lived in Norfolk for 1,500 years, although his roots also extend to London where his grandparents lived and worked.

"The name ‘Self’ appears in the Doomsday Book," he said.

"On my mother's side there are Marshall's and the Bellamy's who came over with the Normans and then on my mother’s mother’s side there are Olinsky's who were Jewish and fled Poland.

"Part of my folklore childhood was my London mother's mother telling me about Olinsky, my anarchist grandfather.

"I have just returned from the alley he died in, and it is nice to know that I have got more dimension to me than just the actually pop kind of 'Norfolkist'.

"I am a Norfolkist, but I am also an internationalist, and I am also a metropolitan but from anarchistic roots," he added.

This is certainly reflected in Self's paintings which manage to fuse together his Norfolk roots with a broader, international feel.  

Norfolk inspiration

East Anglia, if not Norfolk itself has produced so many artistic geniuses, it is almost unbelievable.

The Norwich School of painters was phenomenal both in number and national and international impact. Was it the big skies and large, well lit, landscapes.

The main founder was John Crome, then Cotman who influenced Turner.

Mousehold Heath, Norwich - Cotman (detail)

Mousehold Heath, Cotman (detail)

Colin Self believes that Cotman showed Turner the way, and in turn the School has influenced Colin.

"Cotman was an inventive master although Turner made it much more grandiose and far out and added noughts on, so to speak, but I think Cotman’s revolution in paint always influenced Turner," says Self.

Voyage of discovery

Self has often used natural materials found locally in his work.

"In the 80’s I was making Norfolk charcoal landscape drawings which were using the local material I was using local bonfire charcoal," recalls Self.

"It was literally lumps of wood that I got from bonfires.

"At that time my life was being absolutely persecuted by interfering so called professionals who tried to screw my life up… my house was raided by police and the front window crowbarred.

"I was being given a really miserable time, I had been double crossed."

Self searched the Norfolk landscape for ways of expressing his  experiences and the betrayal he had faced.

"I was going to do a landscape and if I could find two rail crossing places in the same landscape, then the landscape was going to almost sort of symbolise something in my life that was actually going on at the time. 

"So when I got down to just above the Trowse marshes I couldn't get the two level crossings in one view so I just had to do the one level crossing.

"When I got home after having completed that drawing the phone rang and my father said ‘Oh, your Aunt Eva died today’, so that became the actually double crossing. Her life's end became the second crossing of the crossings," he said.

The politics of painting

His engagement with Cold War politics and the nuclear threat has given Self's work a sinister mood and political edge that made it distinct from the mainstream of Pop Art.

Colin Self was horrified by the threat of nuclear war.

"It turned my guts and floored me, destroyed my sensibility and understanding of the world," he said.

"… And years later, I think after five years of inner thoughts which were quite dark, I saw a newsreel film, Kennedy and Khrushchev smiling at each other and exchanging the peace document and my cold war in nuclear art just poured out of me like a torrent that I could not stop."

At that time Norfolk would have been one of the prime targets for a nuclear attack, and this resonates in his art.  In fact, Self was one of only a few British artists to look at the horrors of the Cold War and the nuclear threat.

Views on the landscape

Unlike Constable, Self sees Norfolk as a vibrant, mysterious but lively landscape rather than a 'pretty pretty' chocolate box location.

"The Norfolk landscape is not pretty, it is beyond that, it is much more cosmic, more powerful and mysterious," he said. 

"My landscapes are almost dangerous, they are like a farmer in a tractor who doesn't socialise.

"I mean … money is put before community and then the farmer entertains dangerous thoughts. 

"I think in some of my pictures there is that kind of edge, there is that kind of modernity that somehow transmitted through landscape.

"I went down to Neatishead where you get this quiet sugar beet land come Broadland come ancient churches and reeds. It was a real hybrid of religion and nuclear might and threats and terror!"

"I do a little series called ‘Gorn about’, sometimes done on scraps of paper or they are done on postcards and I literally stick stamps on them and post them home and in a sense that’s the kind of Norfolk person I am.

"They are rapid sketches, mementoes and then when you get back home from your break, the postcards drop through your letterbox and you just kind of get a moment when you can re-live these places all afresh."

Picture this

Colin Self has recently completed a painting commissioned by the BBC - the artist was given just a few hours to create the work and the result is emotionally powerful and visceral.

Colin Self's A Picture Of Norfolk (detail)

A Picture Of Norfolk (detail)

This 6' x 4' oil painting is typical of Self's distinctive vision of the Norfolk landscape.

It's a very striking and haunting work which draws on his feelings about the Norfolk landscape as well as his own emotions.

"I think I got very near to the knuckle when I was painting this… it just welled up out of me. I now think all I've done is to have had some strong feelings - I think maybe it is to do with the death of my son, which I haven't resolved.

"I think it wasn't so much a landscape as using the canvas as a punch bag for emotions and feelings," he added.

The painting shows that Self remains a powerful painter who continues to carry the torch of Norfolk artists into the 21st century.

A Picture Of Norfolk was featured alongside the six-part series A Picture Of Britain, broadcast from 5 June, 2005 on BBC1.

last updated: 20/04/2008 at 17:23
created: 08/06/2005

You are in: Norfolk > Entertainment > Arts, Film & Culture > Arts & Culture > Colin Self: A Picture Of Norfolk

Colin Self: rebel with a caustic wit | Art and design | guardian.co.uk

Colin Self: rebel with a caustic wit

In his new exhibition, One Thousand Sketches, the British pop artist mixes political subversion with a sense of fun

colin self
Detail from A Canary and Tangles! (Daddy Colin Self and Coleen) xxx by Colin Self

For an exemplary artistic life in modern Britain, it's worth visiting Colin Self's exhibition, One Thousand Sketches, at James Hyman Gallery in London. It is full of the joy of the outsider, the fun of rebellion – both political and artistic.

  1. Colin Self
  2. One Thousand Sketches
  3. James Hyman Gallery,
  4. London
  5. W1S
  1. Until 18 December
  2. More details

In the early 60s Self was part of the pop generation of British artists who competed with Americans in their appetite for modern life: but British pop art often had a political edge, and like the movement's visionary founder, Richard Hamilton, Self criticised the establishment. In works such as Leopardskin Nuclear Bunker No 2 (1963), now in the Tate collection, he used savvy sarcasm to confront the masters of war. Pop art was never just about soup cans and celebrities. The bomb was one of the icons of modern life that transfixed it – and at a time when folk song was usually seen as the style of protest, Self showed how a pop iconography could be turned against the cold war.

He continues to be a dissident. His drawings at James Hyman Gallery mix Disney-like cartoons, erotic longings, intimate portraiture, notes for mad projects and Marxist revolutionary dreams. What is lovely about this exhibition, though, is the sense of fun. Here is someone who enjoys his job. Humour never seems to desert him, even when he's angry. All the sketches come from unexpected directions, all flowing into each other like pages in a visual diary. Boundless creativity, steady introspection and honesty shine through to make this a testimony to decades of artistic and political subversion.

Artists of Self's generation had a different attitude to drawing and artistic tradition than the superficially comparable pop generation of 90s Britain. Self, like Hamilton, possesses positively Old Masterish skills. But married to a fascination with modern images, his passion for drawing makes a rich and comic art for our time.

's comment

Comments in chronological order (Total 11 comments)

  • This symbol indicates that that person is The Guardian's staffStaff
  • This symbol indicates that that person is a contributorContributor
  • petrifiedprozac

    9 December 2010 2:19PM

    Now Self is an artist who has too often been ignored. I empathise with his politics more than his political works, I much prefer his works that aren't didactic and seem more private and personal. However, whatever he does, he's an underated artist and has been out of the public eye for far too long.

  • NSCB

    9 December 2010 2:41PM

    JJ wrote:

    Self, like Hamilton, possesses positively Old Masterish skills.

    Here's a link to the drawings. Could you pick one (or a few) and describe in more detail how they reflect "old masterish" skills? Say perhaps by relating them to the easy grace of a Reubens, or the vitality of a Rembrandt, or the intensity of a Goya? I'd be happy if you could even relate it to more modern masters, like Kollwitz, Schiele, or Dix, or even (by more than just being "fun") the cartoonists like Disney or Max Fleischer.

    I really am curious about this.

  • zombus

    9 December 2010 5:21PM

    I've always found Richard Hamilton's work about as interesting and appealing as a dog turd, I'm afraid. In fact, every square inch of it strikes me as loathsome. Or every square inch I have seen of it.

    This Colin Self seems entirely other and better.

  • redyellowblue

    9 December 2010 7:39PM

    NSCB

    Artists of Self's generation had a different attitude to drawing and artistic tradition than the superficially comparable pop generation of 90s Britain. Self, like Hamilton, possesses positively Old Masterish skills.

    I think JJ is suggesting (and If he is I totally agree) that the sketches look like exploratory drawings such as the Old Masters employed - they don't look like 'Works on Paper' such as a contemporary artist might make.

  • tvmum

    9 December 2010 10:44PM

    This is great! I am really enjoying looking at these. Generally I find the quality of the blog posts here to be of very low quality, and I am drawn to read the comments more than the articles! I watched your video discussing Gerhard Ricter's work recently and I was disgusted. It was as if you had just read the blurb on the back of one of his catalogues.

    You should try posting more stuff like this on artists not so widely written about Jonathan! Be honest and just write your unvarnished opinions backed up with art history, context and discussion rather than all the usual hyperbole and lazy pseudo criticism. x

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Tate Collection | Colin Self

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