News - Ray W. Herrick Laboratories - Purdue University

Is it possible to convert a 1920's bungalow into a 21st-century smart home with net zero water and energy usage? That's the goal of Purdue University's RENEWW House, in conjunction with Whirlpool Corporation.

Purdue researchers have added solar panels for heat and electricity, filtered rainwater basins for most water usage, a biowall of plants to filter the air, energy-efficient appliances, and sensors to monitor every drop of water and energy usage.

Patricia Davies has received the 2018 Faculty Mentoring Award from Purdue Engineering, "for her formative role in the development and nurturing of junior faculty members across the College, as well as serving as a model of mutual respect, community building, and sound counsel for staff and students."

Bin Yao, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, was selected as one of the recipients to receive the 4th Nagamori Award through the Nagamori Foundation in Japan. The Nagamori Foundation created these awards to bring vitality to technological research of motors, and related fields, such as generators and actuators, and also to support the researchers and development engineers who have made outstanding achievements in these fields. The fundamental contributions of Bin's main research cited for the award is: "Theory and Applications of Adaptive Robust Controls to Integrated Design of Intelligent and High-Performance Mechatronic Systems".

Yutong (Tony) Xue recently the Best Paper by a Young Presenter Award in Noise for his paper "Fibrous material microstructure design for optimal structural damping." Tony presented his paper at the Spring meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Minneapolis, MN. He is currently working on his PhD with Prof. J. Stuart Bolton.

Heat produces sound waves in fluids -- but Carlo Scalo and Fabio Semperlotti have discovered that these sound waves also occur in solids. This could lead to new thermoacoustic engines, and even power future spacecraft and satellites.

Congratulations to four Purdue ME graduate students who have received Graduate Research Fellowship awards from the National Science Foundation.

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.