Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

This application requests upgrades to an existing system for the measurement of flow and strain fields in fluids and soft solids. The main parts of the existing equipment are still state-of-the-art, while some components have become damaged, obsolete or insufficient for an evolving research program. The equipment will support research on the puncture mechanics of soft solids, the response of engineered and biological material to external stimuli, research on flow through deformable porous media, energy reduction in the pulp and paper industry, cell manipulation, and tissue engineering. The equipment includes software tools for image processing to calculate the local displacement of tracer particles in fluids or soft solids; the software maps the displacements in time and uses the displacement field to generate the strain field and the strain-rate field. The equipment also includes new optical imaging tools and the repair and some upgrades to existing optical imaging tools; the suite of tools can generate projections or cross sections of tracer particles in a sample; these images are then fed into the software tool for analysis.