News - Ray W. Herrick Laboratories - Purdue University

With today’s “smart” homes, you can activate lights and air-conditioning with a simple verbal request. But are these systems really “smart” enough to know which room you’re in? Can they save energy by cooling just one specific corner of the room? That’s the idea behind the Human Building Interactions Laboratory (HBIL), a first-of-its-kind interactive facility at Purdue University that will enable HVAC systems to become truly reconfigurable, right down to the specific wall panels.

Andres Arrieta's team created a giant-sized interactive wall of bistable dots for Boiler Gold Rush, the orientation event for incoming freshmen. It's one of several interactive exhibits that used art to introduce students to engineering.

Did you know there’s a silent war going on inside your home? Alternating current (AC) electricity comes in from the grid, but many of your appliances and lighting run on direct current (DC). Every time you plug in a TV, computer or cell phone charger, power must be individually converted from AC to DC – a costly and inefficient process. Purdue University researchers have proposed a solution to the problem by retrofitting an entire house to run on its own efficient DC-powered nano-grid.

Werner Soedel, who served as a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue for 41 years, has passed away.

Leaders in defense research will assemble at Purdue University for the 2022 Breakthrough Energetics Conference as the invasion of Ukraine and the shadow of a wider conflict underscore the need for improved domestic supply chains for innovative energetic materials. Purdue University and its Purdue Energetics Research Center (PERC), a national leader in research and in educating domestic professionals in energetic materials — propellants, pyrotechnics and explosives – will host the conference Wednesday and Thursday (May 4-5). The conference is organized by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), in partnership with the NDIA Emerging Technologies Institute (ETI), the Energetics Technology Center (ETC) and Purdue.

Purdue was selected as the lead academic partner and headquarters for the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Regional Research Hub – Midwest, and will be involved in the development of a science and technology ecosystem across a wide area of 15 states.

Most airplane wings use hydraulic motors to change their shape and control their flight. But associate professor Andres Arrieta is investigating a simpler kind of “morphing” wing, using bi-stable structures to switch a wing’s shape and stiffness with a minimum amount of energy.

Jim Braun has received the F. Paul Anderson Award from the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE). It is ASHRAE's highest award, given once a year for notable achievement in the HVAC industry.

Summer is the perfect time to learn about air-conditioning and refrigeration, and as the largest academic HVAC lab in the world, Purdue's Herrick Labs is the perfect place. Every summer since 2016, Herrick Labs has hosted a unique cross-cultural learning collaboration, which includes graduate students from Purdue University, Oklahoma State University, and Technical University of Dresden in Germany.

A paper entitled "Characterization of Multistable Self-Folding Origami Architectures," written by Salvador Rojas, Katherine Riley, and Andres Arrieta, has won Best Paper Award at the 5th International Conference on Reconfigurable Mechanisms and Robots (ReMAR 2021).