News - Ray W. Herrick Laboratories - Purdue University

Deaf Kids Code is an organization that brings STEM-focused workshops to kids who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, at no cost. Purdue ME professor David Cappelleri collaborated with Deaf Kids Code founder Shireen Hafeez on a do-it-yourself robot kit specifically for deaf and hard-of-hearing students, which uses light to control the robot. His team developed the robot kit at Herrick Labs.

Jun Chen, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Wenzhuo Wu, Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering are Co-PIs for the engineering team that received a national design grant award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The grant is titled "Development of an Economic Grain Storage System for Rain Season Harvest n Rural Africa".

The earwig insect has more folds in its wings than any other organism in the animal kingdom but uses minimal energy to move. Through simulations and creating a 4-D replica of these folds, researchers from ETH Zürich in Switzerland and Purdue University have likened the wing to self-folding origami that could inform how to make machines be more adaptable and responsive with less energy used.

"The theory of origami assumes that you have 2-D, unstretchable materials," said Andres Arrieta, Purdue assistant professor of mechanical engineering, whose Programmable Structures Lab< contributed to the study. "But imagine that you have a piece of paper and you try to stretch it, and you store some energy there. That stretching creates bistabilities."

Prof. David Cappelleri and a team of researchers are working on a new type of all-terrain microbot that moves by tumbling that could help usher in tiny machines for various applications.

Eckhard Groll, Associate Dean of Undergraduate and Graduate Education and the Reilly Professor of Mechanical Engineering, will receive the Institute of Refrigeration J&E Gold Medal.

Researchers have developed a method to deposit tiny amounts of energetic materials (explosives, propellants, and pyrotechnics) using the same technology as an inkjet printer. This research, which combines Purdue expertise in both energetic materials and additive manufacturing, allows energetic materials to be deposited with unprecedented levels of precision and safety.

A Purdue team is working with Peloton Technology and other partners to help trucks communicate with each other, leading to increased fuel economy and safety. This team got a shout-out from The New York Times in this article about autonomous vehicles...

Professors Jeff Rhoads and George Chiu help develop vibrating sensors that can detect biomarkers for disease in just a drop of blood.

International Refrigeration and Compressor Course (IRCC) Allows Students to Look Beyond the Boundaries of Engineering

Professor Andres Arrieta of Purdue along with Falk Runkel, Giulio Molinari, and Paolo Ermanni of ETH Zurich were awarded the 2017 Best Paper Award in Dynamics and Control of Adaptive Structures for their paper titled "Novel Chiral Structure with Tailored Mechanical Response Exploiting Elastic Instabilities". The award is organized by the ASME Technical Committee on Adaptive Systems Dynamics and Control which chooses from all the papers presented during the Conference on Smart Materials, Adaptive Structures and Intelligent Systems SMASIS2016 on the topic of Dynamics and Control of Adaptive Structures for the year 2016.