Ehsan Dehghan-Niri
Arizona State University Campus Immersion, AZ·Engineering·Early-career
Engineers inspect bridges, pipelines, power plants and aircraft without taking them apart by sending sound waves into a material and reading the echoes — a family of techniques called nondestructive evaluation (NDE). A rare primate from Madagascar, the aye-aye, appears to have evolved its own version.
- Fields
Engineering
Biology
Materials Science
- Topics
nondestructive evaluation
bio-inspired sensing
aye-aye
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Test whether the shape of the aye-aye's pinnae, ear canals and head enhances near-field acoustic sensing by reducing noise and sharpening acoustic beam resolution, using experimental measurements of reflected tapping sound.
- Reproduce aye-aye tap-scanning with a robotic platform that mimics the animal's middle finger, and determine which morphological features of the finger produce distinctive acoustic cues from wood.
- Analyze the acoustic field of the aye-aye auditory system numerically with finite element models to explain how sound is collected and focused at very short range.
- Design, build and demonstrate a bio-inspired tap-scanner for nondestructive evaluation, and use it to detect defects in composite materials.
More about the research
Over roughly 50 million years it developed a foraging behavior called tap-scanning: moving along a tree trunk, it taps the wood with an unusually thin middle finger while holding its nose close to the bark and bending its large external ears forward, listening for the hollow cavities where grubs live. This project asks how that near-field auditory system achieves such fine detection, and uses the answer to design better acoustic inspection tools.
Why it matters
Aging infrastructure fails when internal defects go undetected, and composite parts are difficult to inspect reliably. A tap-scanning instrument modeled on the aye-aye's ear and finger geometry could give inspectors a cheaper, higher-resolution way to find hidden cavities and flaws in bridges, pipelines and aircraft components, and to perform quality control on manufactured parts, reducing the risk of catastrophic failure.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
John Matthews
Louisiana Tech University, LA·Engineering
Develop methods for installation, inspection, structural health assessment and in-place rehabilitation of underground utility systems such as buried pipes, using above- and below-ground test facilities.
Jian Zhou
Binghamton University, NY·Engineering
Engineer a mechanical sensing element inspired by the orb-weaving spider's web that detects acoustic particle velocity, the air motion carried by sound, with near-maximum mechanical sensitivity and ultra-low thermomechanical noise.
Susan Voss
Smith College, MA·Biomedical Engineering
Expand and update the online wideband acoustic immittance database, now over 9,900 subjects from 41 studies, to define normal measurements and show how specific middle-ear diseases change them.
The school
Arizona State University Campus Immersion: 36 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 625 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.