News - Ray W. Herrick Laboratories - Purdue University

This brick circle on Purdue's campus is called the "clapping circle"... when you stand in the middle of it and clap, you hear an odd squeak. Thanks to the just-published research of professor Stuart Bolton and his acoustics students, now we know why.

Congratulations to Haitian Hao, who has received the Leo Beranek Student Medal for Excellence in the Study of Noise Control, for his PhD thesis on solid-state thermoacoustics. Co-advised by Fabio Semperlotti and Carlo Scalo, Haitian was recognized at the recent Internoise conference.

At Purdue Engineering, you can get involved in research, even in your very first year. FYE students Shantanu Sinha and Nathan Stonitsch joined Prof. Davide Ziviani in his project of cooling a lunar habitat simulator, as part of the Resilient Extra Terrestrial Habitat (RETH) Institute at Herrick Labs.

The science of locating sound has come a long way... from tin cans, to holographic microphone arrays. In this special publication from the National Academy of Engineering, Purdue acoustics experts Yangfan Liu, Stuart Bolton, and Patricia Davies discuss the history and future of acoustic source localization.

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.