News - Ray W. Herrick Laboratories - Purdue University

Frank Lee is probably the only refrigeration technician in history to perform his job in zero gravity! After 25 years of service as an engineering technician (on the ground) at Herrick Labs, Frank helped to test a new zero-gravity refrigerator prototype for NASA by embarking on a series of parabolic test flights.

A key lesson from the COVID pandemic is the inherent risk of spreading disease through indoor air recirculation. One way to mitigate that risk is to incorporate outdoor air; however, dehumidifying that air requires huge amounts of energy. Purdue University engineers have proposed a system that combines new membrane technology with the latest HVAC systems, to make 100% outdoor air systems economically feasible – especially in warm, humid climates.

Standard refrigerators use vapor compression to cool down your food. But in space, there is no gravity to keep vapors and liquids secure. Purdue researchers have worked with NASA, Air Squared, and Whirlpool to create a prototype fridge that works in zero gravity, preserving food for potential long-term space flights.

Turning a negative into a positive, Herrick Labs converted office spaces that were empty (because of COVID-19 lockdowns) into much-needed research space. Learn how Herrick is adapting to serve more than 130 grad students conducting world-changing research.

In the Apple TV+ series "For All Mankind," both the US and Russia have built bases on the Moon. But how realistic can that be? The official Apple TV+ podcast talked to Shirley Dyke, who researches resilient extraterrestrial habitats at Purdue, and is building a physical testbed at Herrick Labs.

Energy harvesting – creating electrical energy from cars driving over a road, or people walking on a bridge – has long been theorized as a potential source of sustainable electricity. But due to the physical properties of those vibrations, implementing the process has been largely infeasible. Now, Andres Arrieta has proposed using metamaterials as physical frequency converters, potentially bringing us a step closer to harvesting the energy of those vibrations.

Thanos Tzempelikos, Professor in the Lyles School of Civil Engineering and Ray W. Herrick Labs, has been awarded the prestigious Leon Gaster Award from the Society of Light and Lighting as a co-author of the paper, "Cross-validation and robustness of daylight glare metrics", published in the esteemed journal Lighting Research and Technology in November 2019.

Congratulations to Sansit Patnaik, who won a design competition in Germany by optimizing the battery housing for an electric car. Sansit, a graduate research assistant at Herrick Labs, collaborated remotely with friends at RWTH Aachen University in Germany.

Habitats on the moon will need to be resilient against meteorites, radiation, and seismic activity. The Wall Street Journal recently visited Herrick Labs and talked to Prof. Shirley Dyke about her new lunar habitat testbed.

New autonomous sensor technology may help businesses monitor refrigeration and heating systems in real time much faster and easier than current options. Researchers at Herrick Labs developed the sensor to monitor the oil circulation ratio in real time for heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration systems.