To meet the demands of the Internet of Tomorrow, Indiana University researcher and entrepreneur Alexander Gumennik is advancing smart fibers that could lead to improvements in the management of biomedical and biohazardous materials, the monitoring of our environment and the human body, optical treatments and more. Gumennik is interested in collaborating with industry partners to help bring his discoveries to those who can benefit.
Gumennik, an assistant professor of intelligent systems engineering at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering at IU Bloomington and the director of the Fibers and Additive Manufacturing Enabled Systems Laboratory (ISE FAMES Lab), has developed an Axial Viscosity Gradient Instability Model. AVG-IM enables engineering methods that will turn fiber optics into a smart network interconnect, capable of hooking up emerging computational platforms, such as quantum platforms, to a larger Internet.
Building upon his patented Very Large-Scale Integration for Fibers (VLSI-Fi) technology and the fabrication capabilities of the ISE FAMES Lab, Gumennik’s model enables engineered manufacturing of multi-material architectures that are internal to fiber optics and capable of data processing on the fly.
Smart fibers have numerous applications including consumer wearables, biomedical and hazard management, physiological and environmental monitoring, optical communication, and more. This new technology improves upon traditional methods of creating fiber-embedded multi-material architectures of desired dimensions previously possible only by trial and error.
Gumennik’s model, which was recently featured in Nature Communications, predicts the conditions in which multi-material fibers’ molten cores segment in a fully predictable way. The model uses a process resembling a dripping faucet, which allows the design of the structural outcomes of such capillary breakup, and thus eliminates the trial-and-error process. This is crucial to drive engineerable outcomes, and it enables the self-assembly of photonic and optoelectronic devices and systems with the desired functionality embedded in a fiber.
To create photonics and optoelectronics in fibers, the researchers exposed the fiber to a spatiotemporal temperature profile in a highly localized liquefaction zone. In conditions of a strong viscosity gradient, the physical model can be formulated to define a range of feed speeds of the fiber through that zone, for which the metallic and semiconducting fiber cores of a given thickness can break up in a strict, predictable period. Such fiber-embedded photonics allow for the avoidance of the loss of communicated optical data and thus reduces error rate.
Gumennik’s fiber engineering method transforms fiber optics into a sophisticated long-haul interconnect, capable of communicating the data from one network node to the other with high fidelity and spontaneous data processing to become universally understandable across dissimilar computing platforms. This improved capability is crucial to meet the demands of the Internet of Tomorrow.
This method will help with new computing platforms such as quantum and neuromorphic that have emerged in recent decades. In order to become a resource for the broader audience, those platforms need to communicate with each other and also be wired into the general World Wide Web. The workhorse of such communication—fiber optics—had never been optimized in interconnecting emerging computing platforms until Gumennik and his team used it in a way that has never been accomplished before.
Gumennik has disclosed nine inventions to the IU Innovation and Commercialization Office, which has filed numerous patents to protect Gumennik’s research.
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