Physical Review Journal Club: Ray-tracing Simulations of Transparent Complex Shapes

In this Physical Review Fluids paper, the authors develop a ray-tracing-based method to simulate images of transparent objects. Typically, optical images of transparent objects like drops depend in a nontrivial way on the object’s complex shape and its inhomogeneous refractive index, which imposes limitations on accurate simulations. By means of ray tracing with calibrated illumination, high physical fidelity images are achieved, reproducing features that previous studies could not capture, such as bright-field microscopy images of drops with complex shapes and visualizations of pressure waves inside them. Simulations can be optimized to extract 3D properties directly from experimental images and, due to their high sensitivity to drop properties, can also be used to visualize, validate, and refine fluid dynamics models, with direct applications to other fields like microfluidics or biology. Read ahead: https://journals.aps.org/prfluids/abs...