INNOVATORS Gold Award - New Orleans City Business

INNOVATOR
PHOTO BY SHANNON DIECIDUE
Sanichiro Yoshida, with the Southeastern Louisiana University department of chemistry and physics, is working on a technology to identify the weakest spot in materials ranging from plastics to metals.
Optical interferometry
Sanichiro Yoshida
Key innovation: a method to identify the weakest spot
in materials ranging from plastic to metal
Where they’re based: Southeastern Louisiana University
Top executive: Gerard Blanchard, SLU’s chemistry
and physics department chairman
Year introduced: 2008
IF THE MOST important point in any chain is its weakest
link, then Sanichiro Yoshida has developed a process that
could revolutionize the way almost everything is constructed,
from big bridges to the smallest bits of nanotechnology.
Securing a patent this spring for a deformation prediction
instrument, Yoshida, a professor of physics who specializes
in optical interferometry and field theory at Southeastern
Louisiana University’s department of chemistry and
physics, has come up with a method of identifying the weakest
spot in materials ranging from plastic to metal.
“It is something that we have been researching for quite a
long while,” said Yoshida, who first began to do work with
lasers and lights in the early 1980s before also exploring the
possibilities of optical interferometry a decade later.
Working with Russian scientists in Siberia before the
Soviet Union collapsed, Yoshida built upon their research,
which measured changes in the crust of the earth as a means
of predicting earthquakes through the use of satellite technology.
“We went from that use of this application and put it to
other uses,” said Yoshida, who joined the SLU faculty in
1991.
Applying the principles he learned in Siberia to optical
interferometry, Yoshida has been able to measure the differences
in path lengths when a laser is aimed at an object. By
so doing, the laser picks up on displacements in the object,
providing a valuable and economic tool for engineers and
builders.
Yoshida credits SLU’s undergraduate students for helping
him to repeatedly test his theory. He also thanks the
school, which he said has always supported him in his
research.
That support is hardly an accident, said Gerard
Blanchard.
“We look at research itself as a teaching activity here,”
said Blanchard, head of SLU’s chemistry and physics
department, which has a faculty of just more than 24.
That support, Yoshida said, has been critical in the
development of the deformation prediction instrument
— a development that has proceeded over the course of
two decades.
“These things do take a long time,” Yoshida said, “but it’s
not frustrating. I enjoy the process. It’s my life.”•
— Garry Boulard
30A 2008 Innovator of the Year