Senior Design Projects
ECS193 A/B Winter & Spring 2021
Design and Development of Contact Mechanics Analysis Tool
| tjfinney@ucdavis.edu | |
| Name | Tanner Finney |
| Affiliation | UC DAVIS Dept. of Chemical Engineering |
Project's details
| Project title | Design and Development of Contact Mechanics Analysis Tool |
| Background | When a sphere is brought into contact with a flat surface, reflected light between the two surfaces generates an interference pattern known as Newton’s rings. Within the Newton’s rings, the contacting area of radius r of the two surfaces is readily observable with optical microscopy as a dark or light central disk (Figure 1). We seek to develop image analysis software to measure the radius of curvature, R, and contact area as a function of load, L. |
| Description | Students will assist the design and development of an anal- ysis tool to accurately process images of Newton’s rings and contact area (Figure 1b). The underlying math and analysis methods have largely been developed, but need refinement and validation. Proof-of-concept code has partially been developed. Project team will work with graduate student Tanner Finney and Prof. Tonya Kuhl. Team will meet for approximately 1 hour every 1-2 weeks. |
| Deliverable | A working image processing tool that ingests a sequence of Newton’s rings/Contact area images and returns the center of the contact, radius of curvature, and area of contact as a function of load. Version control will be done via GitHub. Thorough documentation of code is necessary. |
| Skill set desirable | A working knowledge of Python and C++ is recommended. Students will gain experience with image analysis, scientific computing in both Python and C++. During development, code will be kept private. Likely will be released as free software, GPL or MIT license, later. |
| Phone number | 406-274-2109 |
| Client time availability | 30-60 min weekly or more |
| IP requirement | Open source project |
| Attachment | Click here |
| Selected | N/A |
| Stuff | N/A |
| TA | N/A |