Center for Soft Matter Research in Micro- and Partial- Gravity

The Project

The science of concentrated salt solutions and the formation of evaporites is intriguing and complicated. In this context, salt creep is an iconic but deleterious effect which describes the ability of certain solutions to spread during drying and even climb up over solid surfaces. Other salts create dendritic evaporites, ring-like deposits (“coffee stain rings”), or shrink their footprint during drying. These complex dynamics, the variety of patterns, and the multitude of underlying mechanisms make salt creep and similar deposit patterns a hard problem for soft matter science and are—together with only sparsely available experimental data—the main obstacles for reliable predictions and theoretical understanding. Deep-learning strategies are uniquely suited for the analysis of image patterns and can be expected to perform exceedingly well given a sufficiently large database of evaporite photos. In this project, we will compile a database of images and employ these images as both training and test sets for our ML/AI approach.

Team Members

Florida A&M University

Beni Dangi, Ph.D. Principal Investigator Associate Professor Department of Chemistry, FAMU beni.dangi@famu.edu

Rim Hadidi, Ph.D. Postdoctoral Researcher

Venee Pickeney, Undergraduate, Student Researcher

Florida State University

Oliver Steinbock, Ph.D. Co-Principal Investigator Professor Department of Chem. and Biochem., FSU steinbck@chem.fsu.edu

Amrutha V., Ph.D., Postdoctoral Researcher

Semhare Tekle, Undergraduate, Student Researcher

Bowie State University

Jie Yan, Ph.D. Co-Principal Investigator Professor Department of Computer Science, BSU jyan@bowiestate.edu

Ruth Agada, D. Sc. Postdoctoral Researcher

Srinivasa K. K. Kolachina, Graduate Student, Student Researcher

Publications & Presentations