Particle tracking microscopy to measure deformation in soft solids
2021
Master Semester Project
Project: 00416
Measuring material deformation yields invaluable insight into the mechanics of materials,
providing a means of directly probing material kinematics under a wide variety of testing conditions.
While particle-based methods for measuring material displacement using correlation exist,
such methods break down when confronted with sharp gradients in the deformation field because
they rely on a region consisting of many particles to form a robust correlation.
The large number of particles required to establish a robust correlation inherently
blurs any sharp displacement gradients; furthermore, the measured displacement becomes
increasingly noisy as the spatial resolution increases, thus obscuring relevant kinematic
information. Here we aim to address this problem with a hybrid approach of particle tracking
and direct evaluation of the deformation gradient with material-marking-particle-pairs.
This approach will maintain accuracy of displacement measurement on the scale of
inter-particle distance, significantly enhancing spatial resolution and resolution of
sharp displacement gradients. This project consists of an application of state-of-the-art
deconvolution microscopy to locate particles, and tracking methods that exploit a model for
material displacement using the mechanics of the problem of interest. Once implemented,
kinematic quantities of interest will be extracted using data collected from experiments
with large displacement gradients. The efficacy of the method will be evaluated and directly
compared with state-of-the-art correlation approaches on identical experimental data.
- Supervisors
- Thanh-An Pham, thanh-an.pham@epfl.ch, BM 4.140
- Michael Unser, michael.unser@epfl.ch, 021 693 51 75, BM 4.136