News
Using engineering to help refugee women
Chris Andrews: Purdue Motorsports pioneer
In motorsports, you often meet people who have “been there and done that.” Chris Andrews (BSIDE ’92) is one of those people. As a lifelong race engineer, and current technical lead of Vasser Sullivan’s IMSA sports car team, Chris has had an influence on stock cars, open wheel racing, and even Purdue’s own pioneering motorsports teams.
Purdue student sends aerogel research to NASA's Glenn Research Center
William Flaherty: the Olympic skiing rocketeer
Which is more difficult: slaloming down a ski slope at 50 miles an hour, or designing a rocket to travel 1,000 miles an hour? William Flaherty, a Purdue mechanical engineering student, has done both!
Purdue ME grad students receive fellowships and scholarships
David Altenau: the power of pixels
Purdue engineers are famous for launching into space — but only one Boilermaker has built spaceships for Captain Marvel!
David Altenau (BSME 1988) is the founder and chairman of the Pitch Black Company, a visual effects powerhouse whose empire stretches from Star Wars to Barbie to Indiana Jones.
251 years of experience: saying goodbye to seven Purdue ME faculty legends
Creating a 'coral reef' of heat sinks to cool high-powered Intel chips
Could a "gravity battery" work in a residential home?
Sustainable energy sources like wind and solar present a challenge: how do you store excess energy during periods of overproduction for when you really need it? Some large-scale utilities have turned to mechanical energy storage: lifting heavy weights or pumping water uphill into a reservoir. Once that energy is needed, the weight is released and its mechanical energy powers a generator that produces electricity.
These mechanical batteries have been proven to work on a large scale, but never at the scale of a single residential home. A team of Purdue University undergraduates undertook a study to investigate whether a “gravity battery” could be made small enough to fit into a single-family home.