"Acoustically Engineered Materials using Acoustic Radiation Force"

This is an upcoming seminar:

LABORATORY FOR MANUFACTURING AND PRODUCTIVITY SEMINAR SERIES

Date: Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Time: 12:00 pm, Rm. 33-116

SPEAKER

Dipen N. Sinha
Director, Sensors and Electromechanical Devices Group
Los Alamos National Laboratory

TITLE

Acoustically Engineered Materials using Acoustic Radiation Force

ABSTRACT

Traditional device fabrication and manufacturing involve lithography, chemical processing, various deposition processes, and self-assembly among others. In some applications, such as designing metamaterials, one requires methods to create 3D patterns of materials where the traditional methods are neither convenient nor possible to use. In the case of acoustic metamaterials, the majority of the materials built so far by researchers elsewhere is in the cm length-scale and use mm-size solid spheres, cavity resonators or other inclusions. Because of the mechanical fabrication techniques used, scaling to smaller length scales is both problematic and difficult. We are exploring an acoustic approach that allows fabrication of novel materials where the length scale can be extended by orders of magnitude, from a few nanometers to 100s of microns. This approach is based on acoustic radiation force to manipulate particles (nano/micro-sized) into a wide range of 3D patterns in a host fluid that can be solidified. This is a bench-top, inexpensive technique and the whole process is rapid (~10s of seconds). The periodicity of the pattern formed is highly tunable. Almost any kind of particle can be used (metal, insulator, semiconductor, superconductor, piezoelectric, hollow or gas-filled spheres, nanotubes and nanowires etc.) The technique can be adapted for large scale manufacturing. Both the types of materials that can be engineered by this approach and thepossible applications of these new materials can be wide-ranging.

BIOGRAPHY

Dipen Sinha, a physicist, has been with the Los Alamos National Laboratory since 1980. He is the Team Leader of the Acoustics and Sensors Technology team in the Materials Physics and Applications Division. He started as a low temperature physicist but then branched into areas ranging from biomedical to industrial research. He considers his specialty to be a problem solver. His present interests include the development of the technique for acoustically engineering novel materials, acoustic nonlinear imaging, acoustic separation techniques, and adapting the swept frequency acoustic Interferometry and acoustic resonance spectroscopy techniques that he had earlier developed for defense related applications (noninvasive chemical and biological weapons detection) to biomedical and environmental sensor applications; monitoring industrial process and quality control applications, sensors for down hole petroleum monitoring, and a range of diagnostic instruments in many areas of science and technology. He has published in the areas of dynamics of phase transitions, ultra-high speed measurements, high-temperature superconductivity , chemical sensors, instrumentation, and ultrasonic spectroscopy. He holds 20 patents. He is the editor of a recent Handbook on Elastic Properties of Solids, Liquids, and Gases. He has won three R&D 100 awards, a Popular Science 100 award, and has received Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Distinguished Performance Award (1997, 2005), the Distinguished Licensing Award (2002) and two Distinguished Patent Awards (2007, 2008).

* Food and refreshments will be served afterwards *