Dr Sam Mallinson

Dr. Sam Mallinson is an Industrial Engineering Research Fellow in the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering. His research interests include fluid mechanics, heat transfer, structural mechanics, with coupling between these fields of particular interest.

His main focus is in the area of inkjet physics: bubble generation, droplet ejection, print-zone aerodynamics, evaporation and condensation, capillarity and wetting, ink-media interaction, ink mixture material properties, micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and microfluidics.

He has significant expertise in computational modelling, an in particular, use of open source computer-aided engineering tools, such as OpenFOAM, FreeCAD, Gmsh, FreeFem++, SurfaceEvolver paraview and python. He is also an experienced user of the ANSYS suite of tools.

He can propose the following topics for thesis and HDR students:

1. Droplet impact on ideal and real surfaces:
   
   1. numerical simulation of droplet impact and comparison with existing results;
   2. development of dynamic contact models for use in numerical simulations;
   3. simulation of droplet impact on micro-patterned surfaces and paper.
2. Droplet ejection:
   
   1. experimental visualization of droplet ejection from Memjet printhead-integrated-circuits using high speed cinematography;
   2. computational image analysis of experimental droplet ejection events;
   3. numerical simulation of droplet ejection.
3. Print-zone aerodynamics:
   
   1. numerical simulation of flow in the print-zone;
   2. design of a simplified print-zone with moving media path;
   3. visualization of flow in a simplified print-zone.

see Suppressing tiger stripes: Taming flow oscillations to improve print quality

4. Ink material properties:
   
   1. comparison of mixture models with experimental data for determination of ink properties

see Viscosity and surface tension of aqueous mixtures