News - Ray W. Herrick Laboratories - Purdue 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.

Shirley Dyke's RETH Institute (Resilient Extra-Terrestrial Habitats) will play a huge role in Purdue's new Cislunar Initiative, establishing Purdue's prominence in the new lunar economy. Dyke plans to build a quarter-scale lunar habitat at Herrick Labs.

Andres Arrieta creates robots that are inspired by nature: origami that folds like an insect wing. Drones that sense their surroundings like a spider. Listen to him describe his journey on this podcast.

Salvador Rojas worked his way up from being a janitor in California, to being a summer intern in engineering, to now being a Ph.D. candidate at Purdue's Programmable Structures Lab, under Prof. Andres Arrieta. Salvador wrote about his experience for the Los Angeles Times.

We are pleased to announce that Eckhard Groll will become the new head of the School of Mechanical Engineering. He will take over for Anil Bajaj on July 1.

"Spidey Sense" is real! It's called "mechanosensing," and animals have it naturally. Now Andres Arrieta is giving the same capability to autonomous vehicles.