These awards are part of the $43 million awarded to 112 university researchers from 64 institutions across the U.S. in fiscal year 2025.

Three Purdue Engineering faculty were recently awarded Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) grants from the Department of Defense to acquire state-of-the-art equipment to augment their vital research. These awards are part of the $43 million awarded to 112 university researchers from 64 institutions across the U.S. in fiscal year 2025.

DURIP is administered through a merit competition by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Army Research Office and Office of Naval Research, and seeks specific proposals from university investigators conducting foundational science and engineering research relevant to national defense.

Eugenio Culurciello, interim director of the Purdue Institute for Physical Artificial Intelligence and professor of biomedical engineering, will use his award to purchase a humanoid robotic platform to support his artificial intelligence and machine learning research on applied robotics for disaster relief.

Underwater vehicles and Navy vessels are efficient and well-engineered machines, but due to the nature of their operation and environment, they can be susceptible to accidents and require crew rescue and escape, Culurciello said.

“Due to the dangers around the disaster areas and the possible noxious environment, the use of robotic assistants is preferred to Navy Seals or other human operators in such crisis situations,” he said. “What is missing is a world-model that can be foundational for robots to ground knowledge in, and with that knowledge learn the ability to create sequences of actions that provide opportunistic results.”

Davide Ziviani, associate professor of mechanical engineering and associate director of the Center for High Performance Buildings will design a new state-of-the-art testing facility equipped with noninvasive, two-phase flow instrumentation to investigate the behavior of real thermal management components under both nominal operating conditions and faulty scenarios with different intensities.

The facility, Ziviani said, will allow for exploration into the feasibility of embedding sensing into thermal management materials to enable situational awareness and memory-based, two-phase flow control mechanisms. It leverages interdisciplinary expertise within the Center for High Performance Buildings at the Ray W. Herrick Laboratories and the Cooling Technologies Research Center at Purdue.

“It will also enhance our capabilities to provide high-quality education at both undergraduate and graduate levels on the broad topics of thermal management systems and fundamentals of thermodynamics, and heat and mass transfer,” Ziviani said. “Moreover, it provides a unique opportunity to support educational and research programs within the Purdue Military Research Institute across all the military departments of DoD.”

The DURIP award is supported by Mark Spector, program officer in the Office of Naval Research.

Steven Son, the Alfred J. McAllister Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and his co-principal investigator Metin Örnek will use the award to acquire high-pressure thermogravimetric analyzer and differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) instrument systems for the comprehensive characterization of thermal properties in energetic materials under varying pressures, temperatures and gas atmospheres, including static or dynamic pressure conditions.

Son said the Maurice J. Zucrow Laboratories at Purdue University possess unique capabilities for handling energetic materials and routinely conducting synthesis, testing and characterization; however, the facility lacks testing capabilities for thermal analysis under high pressures and static or dynamic gas or pressure environments.

“This instrument will support our DoD work, and in particular our work for the Army Energetic Materials Basic Research we contribute to,” Son said.