6/25/2012 By Linda H. Conway
Written by By Linda H. Conway
Mechanical Science and Engineering associate professor Jonathan Freund has been selected by the College of Engineering to receive the 2010 Xerox Award for Faculty Research. The award is given annually to four associate professors in recognition of outstanding research during the past five years.
Since joining the University of Illinois as an assistant professor in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in 2001, Freund has made research contributions which have established him as an international leader in the field of fluid mechanics. In 2008 he received the Francois Frenkiel Award for Fluid Mechanics, a prestigious honor given to young investigators by the Fluid Dynamics Division of the American Physical Society. Freund’s research spans a broad spectrum of fluid mechanics, from reduction of jet noise to the understanding of transport phenomena involved in biological processes.
Early in his career Freund undertook the first-ever accurate simulations of turbulent jets and their sound fields, and these results are still the benchmark for research in this field. In current research, he is using these methods in conjunction with large-eddy simulations to optimize the actions of actuators that will eventually be used to actively suppress jet noise.
Professor Freund has also been successful in modeling physical systems that have led to several key health-related discoveries. In 2007 he developed a highly original model for estimating the collateral damage to kidney tissue that occurs during shock-wave lithotripsy, a common but poorly understood procedure that uses focused shock waves to break kidney stones. Plans are underway to test his hypothesis at IUPUI and Washington University.
Similarly, he has created a novel fluid mechanics and hydrodynamics model to investigate the movement of blood cells in vessels that has been consistent with several experimental observations. His numerical simulations of 29 red blood cells and one white blood cell demonstrated how interactions between red and white blood cells bring white blood cells to the blood vessel wall. This discovery could well lead to a better understanding of the inflammatory response, as the recruitment of white blood cells to the vessel wall plays a major role in that response.
His expertise in numerical simulations has also produced remarkable results in the emerging field of molecular scale fluid mechanics. His detailed simulations have answered fundamental questions about contact line motion—an important aspect in capillary flow, surface tension and other surface phenomena.
The breadth of Professor Freund’s work is evidenced by the varied sources of funding he has secured—nearly $2.5 million from federal sources such as AFOSR, NSF, NASA, NIH and corporations like Gulfstream, Inc. He is also the Research Director of the Fluids and Combustion Division of the DOE-funded Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets.
Nicholas Fang
Nicholas Fang, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, has been selected to receive a Xerox Award for Faculty Research, based on research achievements he has made within the past year.
Professor Fang’s primary areas of interest include electromagnetic/optical metamaterials and devices, as well as their design and manufacture. His research group seeks to bridge new frontiers in nanophotonics and nanomanufacturing, and concentrates on creating devices for focusing photon and sound into nanometer scale and using them for imaging and nanofabrication. The intent of these devices and technologies is to lead to new methods of observing molecular scale details of living cells without the use of an electron microscope and to open the door for non-destructive screening of drugs and other biological materials.
Fang co-invented an innovative approach to directly nanopatterning metals such as copper and silver using solid electrolytes. As reported in a 2007 article in Nano Letters, this all solid-state electrochemical imprinting process achieves resolutions below 20 nm. This improved resolution allows a dimensionally and economically scalable fabrication approach to creating innovative metamaterial applications like plasmonic superlattice sensors. His group has also reported exciting breakthroughs in acoustic metamaterials. For the first time they focused ultrasound into a tight spot through a metamaterial lens and later demonstrated its potential for cloaking technology.
Fang was a key member of a research group that experimentally demonstrated an optical superlens for the first time, opening the door to nanoscale optical imaging and high-density optoelectronic devices. In a recent article in Applied Physics Letters he and a group of researchers from Livermore National Lab and the University of California, Davis, report that they have set a new record in refining the optical resolution of the superlens.
Fang joined the department in 2004, and since then he has managed to identify important problems and to address them with very innovative and creative analytical and experimental approaches. His work has been funded by DARPA, ONR, NSF, ARPA and Livermore National Labs. In 2009 he received both an NSF CAREER Award and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers’ Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award. In 2008 he was named a Technology Review’s TR35 Young Innovator and ASME recognized him with the Pi-Tau-Sigma Gold Medal. Eight patents are pending in which Fang has played a major role.