Professor Mohan Edirisinghe and Dr Suwan Jayasinghe of the Aerosol Science & Technology Group together with Dr Robert Dorey in the School of Industrial and Manufacturing Science at Cranfield University have been awarded one of the 22 grants (out of 116) funded under the above programme, which invited proposals for adventurous exploratory projects of up to 18 months duration and a maximum of £100k that will advance the understanding of materials issues at the interface with engineering. A call for flagship projects in 2005 will give the successful exploratory projects the chance of continuation funding.



This project entitled "Novel precision patterning of piezoelectric micro-structures by electrohydrodtnamic atomisaton print-deposition" aims to develop a new printing technique which will allow small scale devices to be fabricated. These small scale devices typically with dimensions in the order of 10's to 100's of micrometers combine electronics with structural features to enable them to move and sense the surroundings. Such micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) are currently made using a variety of film forming techniques in combination with mechanical or chemical material removal. There is, currently, a great drive to make these (and more complex) MEMS using a form of direct printing, which will allow the material removal stage to be eliminated and, also, more complex structures be fabricated. With the current technologies it is only possible to construct relatively simple geometric shapes. There is, however. great interest in being able to construct more complex structures which incorporate features such as tapers, overhangs, curves, spheres. and voids. One technology which offers a potential to achieve such structures is direct printing/writing where objects are built up using layers of building blocks (much as a house is constructed out of bricks). However. as the size of these MEMS systems decreases so does the ability of the direct printing technologies (such as ink jet or screen printing) to achieve such small structures. This project aims to explore the use of electrohydrodynamic atomisation to create much smaller droplet sizes and so much smaller structures.