Reported partly in-flight on my way home from the 2012 Technical Conference of TAGA
On Tuesday evening, at the 64th annual conference of the Technical Association of the Graphic Arts, awards were presented to the student chapters of the organization, and the annual presentation of the Michael H. Bruno Award took place.
Representatives of the Clemson University TAGA Student Chapter: Jessie Thomson; Mary Vaughan Williford; Josh Boland, President; and their Advisor, Dr. Liam O’Hara. They are holding the Helmut Kipphan Cup, awarded annually to the university team who win the competition.
The overall best publication award was presented to the students from Clemson University. The Clemson publication was printed and bound by students of the Graphic Communications Department. The student group used various clear and tinted varnishes to enhance the cover and the divider pages with the perfect-bound book.
Clever “analog” animation illustrations were printed periodically in the book, and a special animation bookmark page was included in the book that allows the reader to see the animations on the page.
Included in the technical papers printed in the Clemson book was a graduate research paper by Alexandra Hartman which won this year’s Dusty Rhodes Award for best graduate research paper. Ms. Hartman’s research paper discusses the techniques she used at Nth Degree Technologies in Tempe, Arizona, to make printed supercapacitors.
These thin products can be used in place of batteries to store a small amount of electricity. Hartman’s sponsoring organization, Nth Degree, is the producer of various printed electronic components (see my blog about Bill Ray’s Impossible Bulb).
The difference between a battery and a supercapacitor is that a battery stores electrons while a supercapacitor stores ions. Printing a superconductor required Ms. Hartman to create both the media for printing, and the technique for printing these devices. Her paper is very interesting, and will be posted in the Conferene Proceedings later this year on the TAGA web site.
I congratulate the students of Clemson University for their work, and for their commitment to the TAGA organization. I had the pleasure of sitting at the dinner table with these Clemson students on Monday evening, and I found them to be bright, eager students who are intent of making a difference in the industry. Clearly they have already begun to make a difference.
