Herrick Labs: A Cool Idea
Horsing around
In the 1950s, Purdue Mechanical Engineering professor William Fontaine had a “cool” idea: a lab funded by industry, where graduate students could work on real-world industry projects and challenges. This was a postwar necessity, after government funding of research slowed dramatically. It was also consistent with Purdue’s mission as a land-grant institution.
Fontaine found a taker in Ray Herrick, the founder of Tecumseh Products and a pioneering force in air-conditioning. By 1950, Tecumseh was the largest independent manufacturer of refrigeration compressors in the world. Herrick supplied the funding so Purdue students could tackle industry issues around heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrigeration.
In the beginning, they had to horse around — literally. The best available building on Purdue’s campus was a 1919 horse barn on the south end of campus. Purdue’s School of Mechanical Engineering entered into a unique partnership with the College of Agriculture: an interdisciplinary arrangement to research the effect of climate on livestock and agricultural production.
Not all went as planned. It turns out that mixing chicken coops with sensitive HVAC test equipment was a no go. Legend has it that Fontaine’s engineers stole eggs from the coops, convincing the animal scientists to leave! Herrick Labs took over the entire facility, as the research shifted exclusively to human comfort and high-performance equipment.
“Fontaine was sometimes referred to as ‘Wild Bill,’” recalled Robert J. “Bob” Bernhard, Herrick Labs director from 1994 to 2005. “He was in his element raising funds and recruiting faculty. Today he would probably be referred to as an entrepreneurial personality. Bill had built up excellent relationships with industry in the Midwest. He convinced Ray Herrick that industry needed a research resource for refrigerant compressor research. The first cohort of faculty he recruited to the Herrick Labs were well-established as teachers and scholars. They pioneered something new: balancing results that benefited industrial sponsors with advancing the research field. Convincing their colleagues that this could work was not easy, and was still somewhat controversial even in 1982 when I came to Purdue.”
Herrick Labs became a premier research facility in the fields of refrigeration and air-conditioning. Research into compressors and vibration led the Labs to delve further into acoustics, noise, and vibration, and soon the former horse barn boasted anechoic chambers: rooms that prevent sound or electronic waves from reflecting. Researchers began exploring noise and vibration issues of cars, airplanes, road materials, and other transportation issues. Through it all, Herrick has maintained its equal ties to the academic universe and the real-world needs of industry.
In 2013, Purdue built a $30-million, state-of-the-art building for Herrick Laboratories, bringing its total space up to 83,000 square feet. The LEED-Gold certified building is a “living laboratory,” with more than 1,000 sensors monitoring every aspect of heating, ventilation, air-conditioning, and utility usage. In 2015, it founded the Center for High Performance Buildings, which brings together top minds in industry and academia to develop, demonstrate, evaluate, and deploy new technologies for high-performance buildings. The targets: comfort, data, and sustainability — comfort for humans, data for optimization, and sustainability for Earth.
Building on its expertise in refrigeration, Herrick (which has become the largest academic HVAC lab in the world) now studies all aspects of human-building interactions, from indoor air quality to small-scale vibration and noise studies, for the eco-friendly buildings of tomorrow that will be one of the linchpins of an environmentally sustainable future. Transportation also continues to be a focus, as Herrick hosts state-of-the-art engine test cells.
“Herrick Labs has been an important part of my 30-year career here at Purdue,” said Eckhard Groll, William E. and Florence E. Perry Head of Mechanical Engineering, and Reilly Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering. “It’s a unique place where the best of industry and the best of academia benefit from each other. We see that at the Herrick Conferences, which has hosted thousands of HVAC&R engineers from around the world for more than 50 years.”
Let’s get together
After Fontaine’s retirement, Raymond “Ray” Cohen provided leadership and years of dedication to the Laboratories during its period of expansion, serving from 1972 to 1993. He helped to usher in one of Herrick Labs’ most foundational aspects: a biennial conference in heating, ventilation, air condition, and refrigeration, attracting engineers from around the world.
“I learned about this in England, while studying noise control for jet engines,” Cohen said. “At the time, the British aircraft industry had many short courses and conferences, where their engineers all got together and learned from each other. When we got back to Purdue we said, ‘Let’s do the same thing here!’ And that’s what started the Purdue Compressor Conferences.”
The first conference in 1972 brought dozens of compressor engineers to Purdue’s campus. Soon, they also invited air-conditioning and refrigeration engineers to a simultaneous conference, and the visitors numbered in the hundreds from more than 30 countries. In 2010, they added a third conference for High-Performance Buildings. Collectively, they became known as the Herrick Conferences. These biennial gatherings are now the largest in the industry, attracting nearly 800 engineers to Purdue’s campus for education, fellowship, and groundbreaking research partnerships.
“These conferences have had a tremendous effect advertising Herrick Labs all over the world,” Cohen said. “In this field, wherever I travel around the world, people know about the Herrick Labs. There’s no other group that does exactly the same thing. It’s been a wonderful experience.”
Running in the 90s
Bob Bernhard took the reins of Herrick Labs from 1994 to 2005, and was responsible for bringing interdisciplinary transportation-related research to the Laboratories, including the Institute for Safe, Quiet and Durable Highways. His research at Herrick was in the area of noise and vibration control, with an emphasis on transportation noise and numerical acoustics. Researchers at Herrick study how everyday things make noise — cars, computer fans, industrial equipment, building ventilation, etc. Precise measurements allow for experiments in reducing unwanted noise, making life more pleasant for everyone.
Bernhard, an Iowa native who grew up working on the family farm, received many honors from the Institute of Noise Control Engineering for his work, including president, Distinguished Noise Control Engineer, and fellow. After his tenure as director, he served as Purdue's associate vice president for research for centers and institutes until August 2007.
“I was very blessed to both start my academic career at the Herrick Labs and serve as director,” Bernhard recalled. “As a young faculty member, I learned from wonderful mentors like director Cohen and the senior faculty a very unique skill: how to achieve the simultaneous triple win of doing research of value to industry, mentoring students, and producing scholarly work that was respected by my academic peers. All of the senior faculty members were exceedingly generous mentors. I benefited particularly from the close guidance of Ray Cohen as well as significant advice from Jim Hamilton, Werner Soedel, Henry Yang, Dave Tree, and Victor Goldschmidt. I fondly remember significant moments with each of them. This was the ‘Great Generation’ at its best.”
He put his own stamp on the Labs, broadening the research focus to applications in building systems, automotive, and defense, and added more mechanical disciplines, such as electro-mechanics and perception-based engineering. He and the faculty developed strategies to successfully build private/public partnerships that emphasized the need of industry and were funded by federal and state resources. This offered government agencies a mechanism to support sectors of industry without directly subsidizing individual companies and provided an unparalleled experiential environment for graduate students.
“As director, I had the relatively unique experience of leading a great organization with a clear vision and exceptional culture,” he said. “My 25 years at Purdue and the Herrick Labs were both challenging and rewarding and I will be forever grateful to have had the good fortune of being given these opportunities.”
Passing the Torch
Patricia Davies served as the fourth director of the Ray W. Herrick Laboratories from 2005 to 2019. She joined the Labs in 1987 after completing her Ph.D. and a post-doc at the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, University of Southampton, U.K.; at that time, she was the only female faculty member in the Purdue School of Mechanical Engineering. Her research is in the development and application of signal processing and model building techniques to predict noise and vibration and their effects on people.
As the number of researchers at the Laboratories steadily increased and the variety of research expanded throughout the 1990s and 2000s, it was clear that an expansion was necessary to house the experimental components of the research. This seemed an almost impossible goal, as the costs seemed daunting. A funding opportunity arose because of the 2008 recession and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) which funded, among many other things, new research facilities at the NIST laboratories and at universities. A successful proposal to NIST funded part of the new Herrick building; other funding came from ME and Herrick Labs alumni and donations from industrial partners and foundations. In total, the new building cost just over $30 million.
“The building contains many laboratories and is, itself, a research laboratory,” Davies recalled. “For example, four large spaces that house the graduate students, referred to as the Living Labs, can be reconfigured and operated independently to compare different approaches to space conditioning, and there is a geothermal field that offsets building energy usage and can also be used for research.”
The new building also contained a Perception-based Engineering (PBE) Lab, a highly controllable environment where researchers can study occupant performance and occupant perception of engineered systems outcomes — noise and vibration, lighting, images, temperature, humidity, air flow, and product performance — individually or in combination. The Lab was designed so rooms could be constructed within so that test subjects could be in more natural environments, e.g., in rooms that are like offices, or other rooms at home or at work.
“The underlying goal in all research at Herrick is to improve quality of life,” said Davies, “which means helping industry create affordable products and systems that improve people’s lives, have low energy consumption, do not pollute, and are safe and sustainable.”
A very important focus of the Laboratories, of course, has always been the education of the graduate students. The close interactions with industry during research projects enable students to learn from product experts as well as their major professors. They also learn how their research might be implemented in the next generation of the products.
“With these experiences they are better prepared to embark on their own careers when they graduate,” Davies said. “During orientation, I would tell students that we have great expectations of them because it is their work that will continue to enhance the world-class reputation of the Herrick Laboratories, a reputation established by the hard work of previous generations of graduate students. When our graduates return for visits, they acknowledge the hard work and the relief at finally depositing their theses, but they remember best the people that were with them here and the things that they did together, both the social and work things — they remember the friendships and the help extended to them by the Herrick community.”
During COVID
Next up as director was Jeffrey Rhoads, who joined Purdue in 2007, matured as a researcher at the Labs, and became Herrick Labs director in 2019, serving in that capacity through 2022. Rhoads studied dynamics, vibration, microelectromechanical systems, additive manufacturing, and energetic materials, and was heavily engaged with a number of Purdue’s other research centers, including the Birck Nanotechnology Center.
“I truly enjoyed my time at Herrick,” Rhoads said. “In my formative years I was strongly mentored by my faculty colleagues to appreciate the power of professional relations and partnership. When I was asked to serve as director, I was presented the opportunity to jump start those efforts, both on-campus and across the globe, and work with the faculty to further grow our research portfolio.”
Rhoads’ tenure also spanned the COVID-19 pandemic, which included some of Herrick’s historically darkest and brightest days. “Perhaps the hardest day of my professional career was the day I had to tell our students to go home,” Rhoads notes. “But it was quickly followed by a number of amazing days, as I realized Herrick’s technical expertise in ventilation and filtration, critical transportation, and key national security topics meant we were essential to helping our nation recover from the pandemic. Watching our students, faculty, and staff lean into the research and service tied to those important missions was so powerful — it brings a smile to my face even today.”
Today, as the vice president for research at the University of Notre Dame (a position he assumed from Bob Bernhard after he left Purdue nearly 20 years earlier), Rhoads reflects warmly on his time at Herrick: “An amazingly impactful place, with even better people.”
Herrick 3.0
When Greg Shaver, the current director, assumed his position in 2022, he immediately began planning for what he calls “Herrick 3.0.”
“We have two buildings that we primarily use now, one of which is built around the original horse barn that’s literally 100 years old; we refer to it affectionately as our ‘legacy’ building,” he said. “In my leadership position as director, I’ve been working with faculty, staff, students, and industry and government partners to figure out what we need in a new facility and where our research community is headed.”
One of those areas is researching habitats for use in extraterrestrial applications on the Moon and Mars. “We are researching how we can safely, effectively, and efficiently deploy humans in space so they can do their work safely and have the life support systems that they need. Another thrust is going to be in modular, affordable buildings for use right here on Earth.”
That’s one of Herrick’s world-class strengths: the built environment, the buildings we live and work in now and the extraterrestrial buildings of the future. “We need these buildings to be more cost-effective,” Shaver said. “We also need to reduce the environmental impact they have on society and nature and lower the amount of energy they use. A new facility will be directed, in part, at those areas.”
The outside world is a believer in Herrick Labs’ mission: one-third of the research funding is from industry, and most of the rest is federal funding for application-oriented research. “For more than 60 years, we have ‘leaned in’ to the hard problems our industry partners want to solve,” Shaver said. “That’s why they’re engaged with us in an extremely meaningful way.”
Research Community First
Currently, Herrick has 250 graduate students and 100 undergrads in the Lab working with some 40 faculty, and collaborating with more than 40 companies, as well as federal sponsors such as NASA, the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and others. A big part of Herrick Labs’ DNA is that it is a research community first and foremost.
“We don’t put names on the doors of rooms,” Shaver said. “We work together and we help each other. We say we are community first, and that’s the reason we’re able to get more done, because we work together and really focus on the community first aspect.”
The students at Herrick benefit immeasurably. “They learn things doing research at Herrick that they could never learn from a classroom or reading a book or research paper,” Shaver said. “This is because the research involves so much collaboration with industry partners and government labs. The students are learning skills about how to communicate and how to structure their work and do it safely.”
“Herrick Labs is an incredible environment for students,” said Eckhard Groll, head of the School of Mechanical Engineering. “They have the opportunity to work on unique projects with real impact. When NASA asked us to build a refrigerator that could work in zero-gravity, we enlisted the help of Whirlpool as an industry partner, because we already had a close relationship with them. Students designed and built the fridge at Herrick Labs, and proved its success by testing it on zero-G airplane flights. It’s a project I was proud to be a part of, and it all came about because of the collaborative environment we have at Herrick.”
Innovation Cauldron
Under Shaver’s wing, Herrick Labs is carrying on ‘Wild Bill’ Fontaine’s tradition of industry-benefiting innovation:
- High-temperature heat pump technology to cut our industrial carbon footprint
- A tractor-trailer that charges its own batteries through vibration
- Air conditioners that “talk” to each other to prevent rolling blackouts
- Aircraft components for hypersonic vehicles that can morph in response to external conditions
- Diesel engine breakthroughs to reduce emissions from heavy-duty trucks
Sixty-seven years after its founding, Herrick Labs continues to be an innovation cauldron, dedicated to graduate education through engineering research, with a vision to overcome the barriers between knowledge creation, transfer, and utilization for the advancement of society.
“We’ve had phenomenal leadership over decades — from Bill Fontaine, to Ray Cohen, to Bob Bernhard, to Patricia Davies, to Jeff Rhoads,” Shaver said. “And I’m going to do my best to make sure that the people and supporters and friends of Herrick Labs continue to see great things happen here. If I were to do this for the rest of my career, I’d be very, very happy with that.”
Herrick Labs: https://purdue.edu/herrick
Writer: John Martin, jm@jmagency.com