Image of the Week - 05 July 2004

Direct Write Assembly Visualization on Materials Today Cover

Nature provides an elegant example of "direct-write assembly" in the form of spider webs. In work by Jennifer Lewis and Greg Gratson, synthetic polyelectrolyte inks have been created for writing three-dimensional webs comprised of microperiodic filaments. The fluid ink is deposited into a coagulation reservoir to induce desired changes in ink rheology required for fine-scale printing. This image is a visualization of this process produced in the Visualization, Media, and Imaging Laboratory as a potential cover submission. The filament diameter in the image, based on the actual structures, is 1 um. It was produced using Cerius, mol2mel, Maya, and Photoshop, and was selected for the July/August 2004 issue of Materials Today to accompany an article by the authors.

Image Courtesy: Benjamin Grosser, Greg Gratson, Jennifer Lewis

Contact: grosser@uiuc.edu, gratson@uiuc.edu, jalewis@uiuc.edu