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Tag: University Of Illinois Grainger College Of Engineering

  • NIH awards researchers $1.2M to develop robotic eye examination system

    NIH awards researchers $1.2M to develop robotic eye examination system

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    Newswise — A collaboration between researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Duke University has developed a robotic eye examination system, and the National Institutes of Health has awarded the researchers $1.2 million to expand and refine the system.

    The researchers have developed a robotic system that automatically positions examination sensors to scan human eyes. It currently uses an optical scan technique which can operate from a reasonably safe distance from the eye, and now the researchers are working to add more features that will help it perform most steps of a standard eye exam. These features will require the system to operate in closer proximity to the eye.

    “Instead of having to spend time in a doctor’s office going through the manual steps of routine examinations, a robotic system can do this automatically,” said Kris Hauser, a U. of I. computer science professor and the study’s principal investigator. “This would mean faster and more widespread screening leading to better health outcomes for more people. But to achieve this, we need to develop safer and more reliable controls, and this award allows us to do just that.”

    Automated medical examinations could both make routine medical services accessible to more people and allow health care workers to treat more patients. However, medical examinations present unique safety concerns compared to other automated processes. The robots must be trusted to operate reliably and safely in proximity to sensitive body parts.

    A prior system developed by Hauser and his collaborators was a robotic eye examination system that deploys a technique called optical coherence tomography which scans the eye to create a three-dimensional map of the eye’s interior. This capability allows many conditions to be diagnosed, but the researchers want to expand the system’s capabilities by including a slit eye examiner and an aberrometer. These additional features require the robot arm to be held within two centimeters of the eye, highlighting the need for enhanced robotic safety.

    “Getting the robot within two centimeters of the patient’s eye while ensuring safety is a bit of a new concern,” Hauser said. “If a patient’s moving towards the robot, it has to move away. If the patient is swaying, the arm has to match their movement.”

    Hauser likened the control system to those used in autonomous vehicles. While the system can’t react to all possible human behaviors, he said, it must prevent “at-fault collisions” like self-driving cars must do.

    The award will enable the researchers to conduct large-scale reliability testing. An important component of these tests is ensuring that the system works for as many people as possible. To achieve this, the researchers have developed a second robot that will use mannequin heads to emulate unexpected human behaviors. Moreover, the second robot will automatically randomize the heads’ appearance with different skin tones, facial features, hair and coverings to help the researchers understand and mitigate the effects of algorithmic bias in their system.

    The system will be designed for use in clinical settings, but Hauser imagines that one day such systems could be used in retail settings much like blood pressure stations.

    “Something like this could be used in an eyeglass store to scan your eyes for the prescription, or it could give a diagnostic scan in a pharmacy and forward the information to your doctor,” he said. “This is really where an automated examination system like this would be most effective: giving as many people access to basic health care services as possible.”

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    Duke University professors Jospeh Izatt of biomedical engineering and Anthony Kuo of ophthalmology are co-principal investigators.

    The award, cosponsored by the National Robotics Initiative, will be distributed over three years.

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  • Nanofluidic device generates power with saltwater

    Nanofluidic device generates power with saltwater

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    Newswise — There is a largely untapped energy source along the world’s coastlines: the difference in salinity between seawater and freshwater. A new nanodevice can harness this difference to generate power.

    A team of researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has reported a design for a nanofluidic device capable of converting ionic flow into usable electric power in the journal Nano Energy. The team believes that their device could be used to extract power from the natural ionic flows at seawater-freshwater boundaries.

    “While our design is still a concept at this stage, it is quite versatile and already shows strong potential for energy applications,” said Jean-Pierre Leburton, a U. of I. professor of electrical & computer engineering and the project lead. “It began with an academic question – ‘Can a nanoscale solid-state device extract energy from ionic flow?’ – but our design exceeded our expectations and surprised us in many ways.”

    When two bodies of water with different salinity meet, such as where a river empties into an ocean, salt molecules naturally flow from higher concentration to lower concentration. The energy of these flows can be harvested because they consist of electrically charged particles called ions that form from the dissolved salt.

    Leburton’s group designed a nanoscale semiconductor device that takes advantage of a phenomenon called “Coulomb drag” between flowing ions and electric charges in the device. When the ions flow through a narrow channel in the device, electric forces cause the device charges to move from one side to the other creating voltage and electric current.

    The researchers found two surprising behaviors when they simulated their device. First, while they expected that Coulomb drag would primarily occur through the attractive force between opposite electric charges, the simulations indicated that the device works equally well if the electric forces are repulsive. Both positively and negatively charged ions contribute to drag.

    “Just as noteworthy, our study indicates that there is an amplification effect” said Mingye Xiong, a graduate student in Leburton’s group and the study’s lead author. “Since the moving ions are so massive compared to the device charges, the ions impart large amounts of momentum to the charges, amplifying the underlying current.”

    The researchers also found that these effects are independent of the specific channel configuration as well as the choice of materials, provided the channel diameter is narrow enough to ensure proximity between the ions and the charges.

    The researchers are in the process of patenting their findings, and they are studying how arrays of these devices could scale for practical power generation.

    “We believe that the power density of a device array could meet or exceed that of solar cells,” Leburton said. “And that’s not to mention the potential applications in other fields like biomedical sensing and nanofluidics.”

    ***

    Kewei Song also contributed to this work.

    The researchers’ article, “Ionic coulomb drag in nanofluidic semiconductor channels for energy harvest,” is available online. DOI: 10.1016/j.nanoen.2023.108860

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  • NSF grant awarded for development of method to recover rare-earth elements from U.S. mines

    NSF grant awarded for development of method to recover rare-earth elements from U.S. mines

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    Newswise — The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $2 million grant to researchers who are developing new functional materials to separate and recover rare-earth elements and platinum group metals from waste streams of U.S. mines. These critical elements – which are required materials for widely-used products like smartphones and LED lights – are currently largely mined and processed by other countries.

    Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE) professor Xiao Su at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign leads the project. UIUC professors Diwakar Shukla (ChBE), Alexander Mironenko (ChBE) and Prashant Jain (Chemistry), and Michelle Calabrese (professor in Chemical Engineering & Materials Science at University of Minnesota) are co-Principal Investigators on the project.

    According to the researchers, there is potential for the U.S. to significantly ramp up its production of both rare-earth elements and platinum group metals, as well as secure its supply-chain, through more efficient and sustainable processes for recovery and recycling. Recovery of rare-earth metals and platinum group metals from the waste streams of U.S. mines is currently difficult because they are found as dilute ions in a complex mixture of elements. To address this challenge, the team will develop new polymer-based electrode materials to capture the elements in a way that is highly selective yet reversible, and implement electrically-driven separation processes for sustainable recovery and purification. The researchers combine expertise in machine-learning, molecular dynamics and electronic structure calculations, materials synthesis, characterization, and processing, as well as separation processes.

    “Our aim is to accelerate the discovery of new materials for electrochemical separations through a closed-loop iteration between simulations and experiments,” Su said. “We seek to move beyond a trial-and-error approach for materials design and testing, and establish for the first time a rational framework for creating new redox-polymers tailored for the sustainable electrochemical recovery of critical elements.”

    The grant is administered by NSF’s Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future program. More information about this project, Rational design of redox-responsive materials for critical element separations, is available here. UIUC received $1.6 million in funding, and University of Minnesota received $400,000.

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