Mauro Rodriguez
Brown University, RI·Engineering
When a bubble grows and then violently collapses, a process called inertial cavitation, it can damage pumps, coatings and body tissues. Doctors now hope to harness these collapsing bubbles to cut tissue without surgery using ultrasound.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
inertial cavitation
cavitation rheometry
bubble dynamics
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Develop a method to make linearly graded hydrogels whose stiffness is tuned with ultraviolet light, to serve as model non-uniform soft materials.
- Measure bubble motion and full-field deformation in graded hydrogels using multi-perspective ultra-high-rate microscopy and speckle-based digital image correlation.
- Use departures from spherical bubble shape as a metric for local stiffness gradients, through simulations and a modified one-dimensional perturbation model.
- Build a fast reduced-order model, calibrated against experiments, that describes viscoelastic material behavior and its gradients at ultra-high deformation rates.
More about the research
That goal is limited by a lack of data on how soft materials respond to such fast, large forces. Real tissues are not uniform. They have internal interfaces and stiffness that varies from place to place.
Why it matters
Fast ways to read the properties of soft, uneven materials could speed up assessment during ultrasound-based surgery that uses bubbles to cut tissue. The work could also give insight into preventing injuries caused by rapid forces on body tissues.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Olivier Coutier-Delgosha
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Engineering
Measure how the repeated growth and collapse of cavitation bubbles weakens and ruptures the surfactant film around water droplets in oil, using high-speed visualization of ultrasound-driven emulsions.
Kenneth B. Bader
University of Chicago, IL·Biomedical Engineering
Develop and characterize a tissue phantom, a tissue-like test material, containing an imprintable mechanophore that changes chemically under force, to record the brief stresses created by ultrasound microbubbles.
Ranajay Ghosh
University of Central Florida, FL·Engineering·Early-career
Test whether concentrated salt solutions give green strength to oxide and nitride ceramic powder beds through ion transport and particle bridging during wetting and drying, using mechanical testing, microscopy and x-ray imaging.
The school
Brown University: 23 labs on PI Pages, $375M a year on research, 251 research doctorates a year.
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