APRIL 4 UPDATE: Congratulations to Giridar Vishwanathan (Juarez Research Group). He won third place in yesterday's competition for his image, “Smile, You're on High Speed Camera.” See the winners.
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The list of talented finalists in the Illinois Grad College’s 2019 Image of Research competition includes four graduate students from MechSE.
The Image of Research is a multidisciplinary competition celebrating the diversity and breadth of graduate student research at Illinois. Entries were judged by a multidisciplinary panel for connection between image, text, and research; originality, and visual impact. A full gallery of the 25 semi-finalists can be viewed on Instagram.
The winners of the competition will be announced at a reception on Wednesday, April 3, 4:00-6:00 pm in room 220 of the University Library, where attendees can view the entries and vote for the People’s Choice award.
Awards for First Prize ($500), Second Prize ($300), Third Prize ($200), Honorable Mention ($100) and People's Choice ($100).
Kiat Chan (Mattia Lab) – “The Oscillating Donut”
An oscillating body in a viscous incompressible fluid induces a second-order rectified fluid mechanism, viscous streaming, that lives on much larger time scales in comparison to that of oscillations. These phenomena often elicit interesting steady streaming flow fields. One such case as presented is the flow field resulting from an oscillating torus which artistically happens to resemble that of chaotic attractors. Through a good understanding of how different oscillatory body shapes affect the flow field around it, this fluid mechanism can be leveraged for particle manipulation applications ranging from mixing and separation to drug delivery tasks as well as for self-propulsion of swimming bodies.
Matt Milner (Hutchens Research Group) – “Small-Scale Ballistic Cavitation: High Pressures and Fast Pulses Fracturing Soft Material”
Small-scale Ballistic Cavitation (SBC) is a device designed to deliver high pressure pulses of air though a needle for times as short as five milliseconds. These pulses replicate the temporary cavity formed from ballistic impacts at the same timescale, but without a projectile and on a much smaller scale. It delivers tunable energy densities across a ballistically relevant range with high speed airflow. This image shows the aftermath of delivering a single five millisecond pulse at a pressure of 160 atm within an ultra-soft solid, of similar stiffness to body tissue. The fractured surface is about 1 cm in diameter and the viewing angle is down the axis of the needle. The high rate of deformation causes the three symmetric crack lobes to form around the needle axis as the material is cavitated.
Dhawal Thakare (Ewoldt Research Group) – “Microcapsules: The Building Block of Self-Healing Materials”
Can you imagine materials healing themselves when they are cracked? Guess what, it is possible! Self-healing materials do exist, and do you want to know how they work? These materials are embedded with tiny microscopic containers called microcapsules which are carefully engineered to encapsulate healing agents. My research focusses on designing and synthesizing these microcapsules. The image above shows one such microcapsule which has been cut open and imaged under a fancy microscope which allows us to see very small things! Thousands of such microcapsules are uniformly embedded into the material when it is being manufactured. Subsequently during use, when there is any damage to the material, the capsules are broken and the healing agents are released, thus healing the damage, very similar to as shown in the image. The current phase of my research focusses on developing special microcapsule which can release their healing agents in response to acidity instead of waiting to be broken through damage. This would then extend its application to other fields like targeted drug delivery where precise dosage of medicine can be delivered at target locations when the capsules encounter a specific acidic environment, say in the stomach.
Giridar Vishwanathan (Juarez Research Group) – “Smile, You're on High Speed Camera”
Liquids around us differ widely in their behavior, some are thick, some slippery and some very strange. To tell the difference, we only need to tap gently and watch how they respond. My research involves tapping fluids hundreds of times a second with sound and watching very closely; in an area smaller than the head of the pin, to understand them better. The lower half of the image shows what particles in a liquid experience as it is subjected to such rapid vibration over the course of a few thousandths of a second, while the top half shows the dramatically different motion observed when viewed over a tenth of a second. Combining the information available to us from the top and the bottom images such as the shape and strength of the flow we may piece together the critical engineering properties that are otherwise elusive.
All the finalists include:
- Paul Michael Leonardo Atienza (Anthropology)
- Fan Kiat Chan (Mechanical Science and Engineering)
- Purba Chatterjee (Physics)
- Jaylen De’Angelo Clay (Dance)
- Elliot Emadian (Dance)
- Jay Howard (Crop Sciences)
- Savannah Hubly (Speech and Hearing Sciences)
- Vaibhav Karve (Mathematics)
- Jean Larmon (Anthropology)
- Shelby Lawson (Animal Biology)
- Dicky Liu (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
- Soumya Negi (Cell and Developmental Biology)
- Justin B. Nevill (Civil and Environmental Engineering)
- Lucas Neira (Animal Science)
- Matt Milner (Mechanical Science and Engineering)
- Aparna Pillai (Architecture)
- Daniel Rhee (Civil and Environmental Engineering)
- Puja Roy (Atmospheric Sciences)
- Fatemeh Saeidi-Rizi (Landscape Architecture)
- Jessica Saw (Molecular and Integrative Physiology)
- Dhawal Thakare (Mechanical Science and Engineering)
- Irina Valenzuela (Economics)
- Ramya Pattanur Vasudevan (Architecture)
- Giridar Vishwanathan (Mechanical Science and Engineering)
- Tim Yang (Kinesiology)