A Study of the Abrasion of Squeegees Used in Screen Printing and Its Effect on Performance with Application in Printed Electronics

This article presents a novel method for accelerated wear of squeegees used in screen printing and describes the development of mechanical tests which allow more in-depth measurement of squeegee properties. In this study, squeegees were abraded on the screen press so that they could be used for subsequent print tests to evaluate the effect of wear on the printed product. Squeegee wear was found to vary between different squeegee types and caused increases in ink transfer and wider printed features. In production this will lead to greater ink consumption, cost per unit and a likelihood of product failure. This also has consequences for the production of functional layers, etc., used in the construction of printed electronics. While more wear generally gave greater increases in ink deposition, the effect of wear differed, depending on the squeegee. There was a correlation between the angle of the squeegee wear and ink film thickness from a worn squeegee. An ability to resist flexing gave a high wear angle and presented a sharper edge at the squeegee/screen interface thus mitigating the effect of wear. There was also a good correlation between resistance to flexing and ink film thickness for unworn squeegees, which was more effective than a comparison based on Shore A hardness. Squeegee indentation at different force levels gave more information than a standard Shore A hardness test and the apparatus used was able to reliably measure reductions in surface hardness due to solvent absorption. Increases in ink deposition gave lower resistance in printed silver lines; however, the correlation between the amount of ink deposited and the resistance, remained the same for all levels of wear, suggesting that the wear regime designed for this study did not induce detrimental print defects such as line breakages

Chemistry and the Science of Transformation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

This essay reads the novel in a new way, examining the way that Victor Frankenstein's chemical education (he does not train to be a doctor!) enables his creation of the monster. It reveals that chemists of the period had a different worldview to others where they saw the world in constant transformation and flux. I have written this essay co-written the introduction to the special issue, and co-edited the whole

Landscape and the contours of knowledge The literature of travel and the sciences of the earth in eighteenth-century Britain

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:D063935 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Nathan Filer and Agata Vitale

What can writers and teachers of Creative Writing learn from psychiatry, neuroscience, and other medical disciplines about the links between creativity and mental illness? Nathan Filer, author of 'The Shock of the Fall', and Agata Vitale, Senior Lecturer in Abnormal/Clinical Psychology at Bath Spa University, will be in conversation with Richard Hamblyn of Birkbeck College

Stan Brakhage: the realm buster

Stan Brakhage’s body of work counts as one of the most important within post-war avant-garde cinema, and yet it has rarely been given the attention it deserves. Over the years, though, diverse and original reflections have developed, distancing his figure little by little from critical categories. This collection of newly commissioned essays, plus some important reprinted work, queries some of the consensus on Brakhage’s films. In particular, many of these essays revolve around the controversial issues of representation and perception. This project sets out from the assumption that Brakhage’s art is articulated primarily through opposing tensions, which donate his figure and films an extraordinary depth, even as they evince fleetingness, elusivity and paradoxicality. This collection aims not only to clarify aspects of Brakhage’s art, but also to show how his work is involved in a constant mediation between antinomies and opposites. At the same time, his art presents a multifaceted object endlessly posing new questions to the viewer, for which no point of entry or perspective is preferred in respect to the others. Acknowledging this, this volume hopes that the experience of his films will be revitalised. Featuring topics as diverse as the technical and semantic ambiguity of blacks, the fissures in mimetic representation of the ‘it’ within the ‘itself’ of an image, the film-maker as practical psychologist through cognitive theories, the critique of ocularcentrism by mingling sight with other senses such as touch, films that can actually philosophise in a Wittgensteinian way, political guilt and collusion in aesthetic forms, a disjunctive, reflexive, and phenomenological temporality realising Deleuze’s image-time, and the echoes of Ezra Pound and pneumophantasmology in the quest of art as spiritual revelation; this book addresses not only scholars, but also is a thorough and thought-provoking introduction for the uninitiated