Innovative Digital Inline Holography: From Wall-bounded Turbulence to Cancer Diagnosis

ABSTRACT:  Particles (e.g., dust, cells, droplets) with size ranging from nm to mm are ubiquitous in our daily life. To determine their properties in situ is vital for many applications. Here I will share with you our recent advancement in both the instrumentation and computational algorithms of digital inline holography (DIH) as a low cost and compact tool for 3D imaging of particles suspended in the flow. Enabled by such advancement, we have implemented DIH not only to study fundamental problems in the field of fluid dynamics, but also characterize particle properties and behaviors in agriculture, meteorology, medical sciences, microbiology, material sciences, etc. A number of such examples including measurements of wall-bounded turbulent flows, characterization of risks of airborne disease transmission, and detection of cancer cells in a blood stream will be provided.

BIOGRAPHY:  Jiarong Hong is an associate professor in Mechanical Engineering at University of Minnesota. He received his B.S. from University of Science and Technology of China in 2005, M.S. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 2008 and 2011. He is interested in developing novel flow imaging techniques aka flowscopes that allow us to “see” the flow and particle movements within the flow at unprecedented spatial and temporal resolutions across a broad range of disciplines. Using such flowscopes, his work not only addresses challenging fundamental questions in the field of fluid dynamics, but also enables research in other fields including oceanography, agriculture, robotics and sensing, microbiology, medical sciences, material sciences, etc.