AIIM has a strong history of successful student completions in engineering and physics, and encompassing areas such as optics, interferometry and spectroscopy of high temperature plasmas, tomography and software engineering.  The group's interests straddle medical imaging, plasma physics, industrial applications and inverse methods.  There are many opportunities for bright students to apply their own imagination to innovative and challenging projects.

We have a number of projects available, suitable for vacation, honours and higher level postgraduate students.

The following contains a number of brief project descriptions.  However, I am very happy to provide more detailed information to interested students and to tailor the scope of certain projects to match the course of study.

 

• Experimental Study of Ion Heating in the H-1 Helical Axis Stellarator

• Microwave imaging of human tissue 

• Fast switching polarization interferometers for high resolution spectroscopic imaging

• Development of robust inverse methods for flow field tomography in the H-1 heliac.

 

There are also a number of interesting projects on offer for 4th engineers, including

• Remote software/electronic control of rapid-scan plasma interferometer

• LabVIEW software development for coherence pyrometer

Please contact me directly for more information on engineeering projects.  AIIM can offer funding support for qualified students.

 

Experimental Study of Ion Heating in the H-1 Helical Axis Stellarator

The H-1 heliac Major National Research Facility in the Research School of Physical Sciences at the Australian National University is a toroidal magnetic confinement device for the study of high-temperature fusion-relevant plasma physics.  The machine is equipped with a number of high-power (>100kW) systems for heating electrons and ions to temperatures of the order of 10⁶ K by resonantly exciting them at their cyclotron frequency and harmonics.  This produces a population of energetic particles which then collisionally thermalize with the background plasma.

We have recently developed novel imaging systems that for the first time allow two-dimensional high-speed imaging of plasma ion temperature and flows based on the Doppler broadening and shifting of spectral emission lines.  These capabilities allow detailed study of the resonant absorption processes that heat ions, as well as ion energy transport processes.  The system also allows direct imaging of plasma flow fields which can vary in response to the changing ion temperature.

The project would involve the extension of the measurement techniques to allow extended velocity-space imaging of the ion velocity distribution function.  Power modulation methods will be used to explore the absorption and relaxation processes, while tomographic procedures will be applied for the extraction of local information about the 3-d plasma structure from the 2-d projection images.

 

Microwave imaging of human tissue

Objective: To develop and apply finite-difference-time-domain numerical methods for modeling microwave propagation in a complex dielectric medium (human tissue).

The marked contrast in dielectric properties between normal and malignant tissue at microwave frequencies, and the non-ionizing nature of the probing radiation make the use of microwave imaging systems an attractive proposition for diagnosing human breast cancer. The overall project involves the development of a microwave scanning system together with numerical algorithms for the extraction of the source refractive index distribution from measurements of the complex wave-field (amplitude and phase) on the boundary.
The honours component of the work will be to numerically explore various probing modalities to investigate the feasibility of detecting, without recourse to iterative reconstruction methods, the presence or otherwise of abnormal tissue. There may be the opportunity to compare the results of numerical simulations with experiments using the 2-D prototype scanner during the course of the

 

Fast switching polarization interferometers for high resolution spectroscopic imaging

The AIIM group has pioneered a range of novel optical instruments for coherence imaging applications in both science and industry.  Using spatial or temporal multiplex methods, the systems are designed to capture only the essential 2-d colour information necessary to characterise the physical properties of a given scene. This project would continue and extend this work to the devlopment of hybrid spatio-temporal mutliplex systems for the characterisation of more complex spectral scenes.

The work would involve optical design and testing, LabVIEW software development and some signal processing.

 

Development of robust inverse methods for flow field tomography in the H-1 heliac.

The H-1 heliac is a toroidal magnetic confinement device with a helical axis and strongly spatially-modulated magnetic field configuration.  The absence of simple symmetries imposes the need for fully-three-dimensional imaging systems capable of measuring the most important plasma parameters.

The advent of fast CCD digital imaging systems, combined with our patented coherence imaging technology now opens unique opportunities to undertake three dimensional tomographic imaging of both scalar and vector fields of importance for studying the confined plasma properties.  These include the plasma ion temperature and flow fields which can be recovered from coherence imaging of Doppler broadened spectral emission lines.

The project would involve the development of numerical processing and tomographic inversion procedures for flow and temperature field imaging in the presence of modulated particle injection localized in the camera field-of-view.