SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will support the development of a novel approach, based on holographic video microscopy, to analyze the physical properties of colloidal dispersions. This technology will have immediate applications in industries as diverse as pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, personal care products, petrochemicals and food, all of which rely on the properties of colloidal dispersions and the microscopic particles from which they are composed. The worldwide market for particle characterization exceeded $5 billion per year in 2012. The present effort's holographic characterization technology extends the state-of-the-art in particle characterization by providing simultaneous information about both the size and the composition of individual particles in dispersion, and by building up a clear picture of the distribution of properties within a sample without relying on models or assumptions. Access to these new dimensions of information will be useful for product development, process control and quality assurance in all of the industrial sectors that rely on the properties of colloidal materials, thereby increasing opportunities for innovation, enhancing product performance, and decreasing manufacturing costs. In addition to capturing a share of the established market for particle characterization, this new product may also broaden the market by creating new application areas.

The intellectual merit of this project resides in transforming holographic video microscopy from an academic research tool to a powerful commercial instrument. Several innovations are required to make this revolutionary technology commercially viable. In its present incarnation, holographic characterization has been demonstrated with nearly ideal spheres, for which it yields the size to within a nanometer, the complex refractive index to within a part per thousand, and the time-resolved trajectory to within a nanometer in three dimensions. No other particle characterization technique offers such a wealth of particle-resolved information. This Phase I effort will demonstrate the feasibility of holographic particle characterization for a range of non-ideal industrial materials by applying state-of-the-art methods of machine learning to extend the technique's domain of applicability while simultaneously reducing the time per analysis from seconds to tens of milliseconds. This 100-fold acceleration, and the associated reduction in computational cost, will enable the technology to be deployed in large-volume and high-throughput applications. The resulting real-time insights into colloidal dispersions' compositions will improve manufacturing efficiency by identifying and helping to correct process deviations and failures. In so doing it will reduce product costs in all of the industrial sectors that develop and sell colloidal materials.

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will enable a commercial implementation of holographic video microscopy, a fast, precise and flexible technology for measuring the properties of individual colloidal particles suspended in fluid media. This disruptive technology solves critical manufacturing problems across industries that work with colloidal dispersions. Demonstrated applications include: 1) monitoring the growth of nanoparticle agglomerates in precision slurries used to polish semiconductor wafers where scratches due to slurry agglomerates are responsible for waste valued at $1 billion annually; 2) tracking concentrations of dangerous contaminants in wastewater streams; and 3) measuring the concentration of protein aggregates in biopharmaceuticals, a safety concern noted by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in this $250 billion industry. Holographic video microscopy is unique among particle-characterization technologies in providing comprehensive information about the size, shape and composition of individual particles in real time and in situ. Having access to this wealth of data facilitates product development, creates new opportunities for process control and provides a new tool for quality assurance across a broad spectrum of industries enabling safer, less expensive products for consumers while providing cost savings to manufacturers.The technical objectives of this project are: 1) to optimize the design of the underlying holographic microscopy system without compromising the quality of results; 2) to enable quantitative concentration determination including corrections for perturbations introduced by flow dynamics; 3) to expand the domain of operation to characterize non-spherical particles and 4) to apply machine-learning algorithms for automated robust operation. Using holographic video microscopy for commercial applications requires adaptation and innovation in the design of the prototype instrument that was used to demonstrate feasibility. Streamlining the optical train will require advanced modeling and the creation of new methods of correcting optical aberrations to enable ease of manufacture. Additional improvements in design will include advances in improving microfluidic flow control to generate accurate concentration determination, to adapt holographic analysis algorithms for characterizing the structure of aspheric particles, and to extend analytical capabilities for turbid fluids. Finally, innovative machine-learning using neural network algorithms demonstrated significant improvements for analytical robustness in Phase I and will be extended to a wider range of applications. The Phase II effort will enable holographic video microscopy of real-world samples with typical measurement times of a few minutes.