Raimund Schlüßler

Optical multi-point measurements of the acoustic particle velocity with frequency modulated Doppler global velocimetry

To reduce the noise of machines such as aircraft engines, the development and propagation of sound has to be investigated. Since the applicability of microphones is limited due to their intrusiveness, contactless measurement techniques are required. For this reason, the present study describes an optical method based on the Doppler effect and its application for acoustic particle velocity (APV) measurements. While former APV measurements with Doppler techniques are point measurements, the applied system is capable of simultaneous measurements at multiple points. In its current state, the system provides linear array measurements of one component of the APV demonstrated by multi-tone experiments with tones up to 17 kHz for the first time.

Lock-in spectroscopy employing a high-speed camera and a micro-scanner for volumetric investigations of unsteady flows.

Spectroscopic methods are established tools for nonintrusive measurements of flow velocity. However, those methods are either restricted by measuring pointwise or with low measurement rates of several hertz. To investigate fast unsteady phenomena, e.g., in sprays, volumetric (3D) measurement techniques with kHz rate are required. For this purpose, a spectroscopic technique is realized with a power amplified, frequency modulated laser and an Mfps high-speed camera. This allows fast continuous planar measurements of the velocity. Volumetric data is finally obtained by slewing the laser light sheet in depth with an oscillating microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) scanner. As a result, volumetric velocity measurements are obtained for 256×128×25 voxels over 14.4  mm×7.2  mm×6.5  mm with a repetition rate of 1 kHz, which allows the investigation of unsteady phenomena in sprays such as transients and local velocity oscillations. The respective measurement capabilities are demonstrated by experiments. Hence, a significant progress regarding the data rate was achieved in spectroscopy by using the Mfps high-speed camera, which enables new application fields such as the analysis of fast unsteady phenomena.

Mechanical Mapping of Spinal Cord Growth and Repair in Living Zebrafish Larvae by Brillouin Imaging

The mechanical properties of biological tissues are increasingly recognized as important factors in developmental and pathological processes. Most existing mechanical measurement techniques either necessitate destruction of the tissue for access or provide insufficient spatial resolution. Here, we show for the first time to our knowledge a systematic application of confocal Brillouin microscopy to quantitatively map the mechanical properties of spinal cord tissues during biologically relevant processes in a contact-free and nondestructive manner. Living zebrafish larvae were mechanically imaged in all anatomical planes during development and after spinal cord injury. These experiments revealed that Brillouin microscopy is capable of detecting the mechanical properties of distinct anatomical structures without interfering with the animal’s natural development. The Brillouin shift within the spinal cord remained comparable during development and transiently decreased during the repair processes after spinal cord transection. By taking into account the refractive index distribution, we explicitly determined the apparent longitudinal modulus and viscosity of different larval zebrafish tissues. Importantly, mechanical properties differed between tissues in situ and in excised slices. The presented work constitutes the first step toward an in vivo assessment of spinal cord tissue mechanics during regeneration, provides a methodical basis to identify key determinants of mechanical tissue properties, and allows us to test their relative importance in combination with biochemical and genetic factors during developmental and regenerative processes.

Optimizations for optical velocity measurements in narrow gaps

Abstract. Measuring the flow velocity in small gaps or near a surface with a nonintrusive optical measurement technique is a challenging measurement task, as disturbing light reflections from the surface appear. However, these measurements are important, e.g., in order to understand and to design the leakage flow in the tip gap between the rotor blade end face and the housing of a turbomachine. Hence, methods to reduce the interfering light power and to correct measurement errors caused by it need to be developed and verified. Different alternatives of minimizing the interfering light power for optical flow measurements in small gaps are presented. By optimizing the beam shape of the applied illumination beam using a numerical diffraction simulation, the interfering light power is reduced by up to a factor of 100. In combination with a decrease of the reflection coefficient of the rotor blade surface, an additional reduction of the interfering light power below the used scattered light power is possible. Furthermore, a correction algorithm to decrease the measurement uncertainty of disturbed measurements is derived. These improvements enable optical three-dimensional three-component flow velocity measurements in submillimeter gaps or near a surface.

Mechanical mapping of spinal cord development and repair in living zebrafish larvae using Brillouin microscopy

The mechanical properties of biological tissues are increasingly recognized as important in developmental and pathological processes. Most existing mechanical measurement techniques either necessitate destruction of the tissue for access or provide insufficient spatial resolution. Here, we show for the first time a systematic application of confocal Brillouin microscopy to quantitatively map the mechanical properties of spinal cord tissues during biologically relevant processes in a contact-free and non-destructive manner. Living zebrafish larvae were mechanically imaged in all anatomical planes, during development and after spinal cord injury. These experiments revealed that Brillouin microscopy is capable of detecting the mechanical properties of distinct anatomical structures without interfering with the animal’s natural development. The Brillouin shift within the spinal cord increased during development and transiently decreased during the repair processes following spinal cord transection. These results show that the larval zebrafish spinal cord tissue presents mechanical signals for mechanosensitive cells residing in the tissue. The work presented constitutes the first step towards an in vivo assessment of spinal cord tissue mechanics during regeneration, provides a methodical basis to identify key determinants of mechanical tissue properties and allows to test their relative importance in combination with biochemical and genetic factors during developmental and regenerative processes.

Droplet-Assisted Microfluidic Fabrication and Characterization of Multifunctional Polysaccharide Microgels Formed by Multicomponent Reactions

Polysaccharide-based microgels have broad applications in multi-parametric cell cultures, cell-free biotechnology, and drug delivery. Multicomponent reactions like the Passerini three-component and the Ugi four-component reaction are shown in here to be versatile platforms for fabricating these polysaccharide microgels by droplet microfluidics with a narrow size distribution. While conventional microgel formation requires pre-modification of hydrogel building blocks to introduce certain functionality, in multicomponent reactions one building block can be simply exchanged by another to introduce and extend functionality in a library-like fashion. Beyond synthesizing a range of polysaccharide-based microgels utilizing hyaluronic acid, alginate and chitosan, exemplary in-depth analysis of hyaluronic acid-based Ugi four-component gels is conducted by colloidal probe atomic force microscopy, confocal Brillouin microscopy, quantitative phase imaging, and fluorescence correlation spectroscopy to elucidate the capability of microfluidic multicomponent reactions for forming defined polysaccharide microgel networks. Particularly, the impact of crosslinker amount and length is studied. A higher network density leads to higher Young’s moduli accompanied by smaller pore sizes with lower diffusion coefficients of tracer molecules in the highly homogeneous network, and vice versa. Moreover, tailored building blocks allow for crosslinking the microgels and incorporating functional groups at the same time as demonstrated for biotin-functionalized, chitosan-based microgels formed by Ugi four-component reaction. To these microgels, streptavidin-labeled enzymes are easily conjugated as shown for horseradish peroxidase (HRP), which retains its activity inside the microgels.

In vivo Brillouin microscopy of the larval zebrafish spinal cord (Conference Presentation)

The mechanical properties of biological tissues are increasingly recognized as crucial parts of signaling cascades involved in developmental and pathological processes. While most techniques measuring intrinsic mechanical properties necessitate invasive sample preparations or are currently applicable only to large sample dimensions, confocal Brillouin microscopy provides means to quantify the mechanical properties of single cells and tissues in a contact- and label-free manner. Here, we show for the first time a systematic application of confocal Brillouin microscopy to quantify physical properties of tissues in vivo. By using our custom-built Brillouin microscope, zebrafish larvae were probed in all anatomical planes, at different time points during development and after spinal cord injury. These experiments revealed that confocal Brillouin microscopy is capable of detecting the mechanical properties of distinct anatomical structures without interfering with the animal’s natural development. We furthermore detected an increasing Brillouin shift of spinal cord tissue during development and a transiently decreasing Brillouin shift after spinal cord injury. The presented work constitutes the first step towards an in vivo assessment of spinal cord tissue mechanics during regeneration, provides a basis to identify key determinants of mechanical tissue properties and allows to test their importance in combination with biochemical and genetic factors.

Axonal Transport, Phase-Separated Compartments, and Neuron Mechanics - A New Approach to Investigate Neurodegenerative Diseases

Many molecular and cellular pathogenic mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases have been revealed. However, it is unclear what role a putatively impaired neuronal transport with respect to altered mechanical properties of neurons play in the initiation and progression of such diseases. The biochemical aspects of intracellular axonal transport, which is important for molecular movements through the cytoplasm, e.g., mitochondrial movement, has already been studied. Interestingly, transport deficiencies are associated with the emergence of the affliction and potentially linked to disease transmission. Transport along the axon depends on the normal function of the neuronal cytoskeleton, which is also a major contributor to neuronal mechanical properties. By contrast, little attention has been paid to the mechanical properties of neurons and axons impaired by neurodegeneration, and of membraneless, phase-separated organelles such as stress granules (SGs) within neurons. Mechanical changes may indicate cytoskeleton reorganization and function, and thus give information about the transport and other system impairment. Nowadays, several techniques to investigate cellular mechanical properties are available. In this review, we discuss how select biophysical methods to probe material properties could contribute to the general understanding of mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative diseases.

Brillouin micro-elastography for three-dimensional, nonintrusive studies of zebrafish spinal cord (Conference Presentation)

The mechanical properties of biological tissues are increasingly recognized as crucial parts of signaling cascades involved in developmental and pathological processes. Most existing mechanical measurement techniques require either highly invasive sample preparations and destruction of the tissue for access, such as atomic force microscope, or provide insufficient spatial resolution, such as sonoelastography and magnetic resonance elastography. The optical elastography is an emerging field in biomedicine, which allows to capture an image of the elasticity module with subcellular resolution. We present as a promising method a quantitative micro-elastography based on Brillouin scattering, which is the inelastic scattering of photons by acoustic phonons with gigahertz frequency. Using a virtually imaged phased array (VIPA) based spectrometer and a confocal microscope a label-free, three-dimensional, non-intrusive micro-elastography with the absence of extrinsic mechanical loading is provided. In this paper, we present a systematic application of Brillouin micro-elastography to quantify physical properties of native larval zebrafish tissues in vivo. We detected a transiently decreasing Brillouin frequency shift after spinal cord injury. The presented work constitutes the first step towards an in vivo assessment of spinal cord tissue mechanics during regeneration, provides a basis to identify key determinants of mechanical tissue properties and allows to test their importance in combination with biochemical and genetic factors.

Mehrpunktmessungen der Schallschnelle mittels neuartigem Lasermessverfahren

Zusammenfassung Zur Fluglärmreduzierung muss die Interaktion komplexer Strömungs- und Schallphänomene in Triebwerksschalldämpfern analysiert werden. Hierfür wird erstmals ein Doppler-Global-Velozimeter mit Laserfrequenzmodulation eingesetzt und eine Mehrpunktmessung der Schallschnelle in einem Kundtschen Staubrohr demonstriert. Im Ergebnis wurden Schnelleamplituden im Hörbereich aufgelöst, die Messunsicherheit betrug minimal 3 mm/s bei einer Messdauer von 1 s. Die Messtechnik bietet somit hohes Potential bei der Analyse und Optimierung von Triebwerkschalldämpfern. Abstract Reducing aircraft noise requires the analysis of the complex interaction between flow and sound phenomena in jet engine dampers. Therefore a Doppler global velocimeter with laser frequency modulation is used for the first time for the multi-point measurement of the acoustic particle velocity in a Kundt´s tube. As a result, particle velocity amplitudes within the hearing range have been resolved, the minimal measurement uncertainty amounts to 3 mm/s at a measurement period of 1 s. The measurement technique has high potential in respect of analyzing and optimizing jet engine dampers.