One of our recent highlights is the graduation of Zoe Davidson. She completed her Btech in Opto-electronics with a project in the Physical Acoustics Lab on monitoring the ripeness of fruit. Every day, Zoe carefully recorded laser ultrasonic wavefields on a Braeburn apple. She was able to make quantitative inferences on the (an)elastic properties of the apple, and their time-lapse behaviour. She found, for example, that the elasticity of her apple deteriorated at roughly 1% per day at room conditions. The image above shows part of her wave fields for a suite of consecutive days (legend in hours); you can clearly see the systematic slowing of the waves as the apple grows older.
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