News - Ray W. Herrick Laboratories - Purdue University

PhD student Riley Barta has developed a turbomachine expander that helps harvest previously wasted energy used in the process of moving air from high to low pressure. The device can be used as a control agent within existing heat pumps. Purdue is world-renowned in research of refrigeration and compressors.

Prof. Yan Chen studies how airborne viruses spread in enclosed environments like airplanes and cruise ships. Keeping coronavirus patients on board a cruise ship is the worst thing they could have done, because a cruise ship's HVAC system can't filter out the virus, and may end up spreading it even more.

Future long-term habitats on the Moon or Mars will have to be resilient against many hazards, including radiation, sandstorms, quakes, and meteorites. Prof. Shirley Dyke is the director of the Resilient Extra Terrestrial Habitats Institute (RETHi), a NASA-funded institute researching how to make these habitats resilient, self-monitoring, and serviceable autonomously. She discusses these challenges in the latest issue of Civil Engineering magazine.

Prof. Shirley Dyke announces two workshops focused on smart structures, both to be hosted at Purdue University in July 2020.

Patricia Davies has received the Violet Haas Award, recognizing people who have facilitated the advancement of women in hiring, promotion, education and salary, or have enhanced a positive professional climate for women at the University

Purdue University engineers have studied energetic materials (explosives, propellants and pyrotechnics) for many years. Now, for the first time ever, they have used high speed x-rays to look inside these energetic materials during an actual explosion, to determine exactly what causes them to react. This collaboration involves Herrick Labs, Zucrow Labs, and Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.

Andres Arrieta has won the 2019 Best Paper Award from ASME's Aerospace Division, Bioinspired Smart Materials and Systems Technical Committee, awarded in September in Louisville, KY. The paper describes how Arrieta and colleagues from ETH Zurich duplicated the bi-stable folding wing shape of an earwig.

Brandon Boor studies indoor air contaminants. He's conducting one of the largest studies of its kind in the Living Labs at Herrick, specially-designed office spaces that are rigged with thousands of sensors. The goal is to identify all types of indoor air contaminants and recommend ways to control them through how a building is designed and operated.

Several Herrick Labs researchers were honored at NoiseCon 2019, the annual meeting of the Institute of Noise Control Engineers (INCE-USA).

Congratulations to Jillian Joffe, recipient of the Women in Defense Horizons Scholarship. A graduate student under professor Jeff Rhoads, Jillian is the 3rd Purdue woman to win the scholarship in two years.