News

The 2nd annual Collegiate Drone Racing Championship flew into Purdue University on Saturday, April 14. More than 64 pilots attended the event at Lambert Fieldhouse, from 20 different universities across the country. Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University dominated the event, with their Daytona Beach, Florida team finishing 1st, and their Prescott, Arizona campus finishing 3rd. University of Central Florida finished 2nd.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Purdue ME just celebrated 10 years of their partnership. More than 300 Purdue ME students have spent semesters in Shanghai in the past decade.

PathVis, the mobile pathology lab developed by Purdue University Mechanical Engineering and Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, is a finalist for Fast Company's 2018 World Changing Ideas Awards. Using a smartphone, PathVis can detect cholera in a water sample in just 30 minutes, rather than the 3 days of traditional tests.

Did you know that explosives and propellants generate a piezoelectric effect? Steve Son and Zucrow Labs just received a $7.5 million Air Force grant to thoroughly study it for the first time.

What is a "rockoon"? A rocket launched from a balloon, bypassing 98% of the earth's atmosphere. It may revolutionize the micro-satellite business. A new Purdue startup, Leo Aerospace LLC, hopes to do just that. Dane Rudy (BSME '17) is the CEO.

Engineering solves important challenges everywhere, including in rural Africa. Jun Chen, associate professor at Purdue ME, is part of a multidisciplinary team who received a national design grant from the Environmental Protection Agency for a sustainable system to store grains during the rainy season.

Xianfan Xu has just demonstrated a thin film that can dissipate heat by flowing electrons on its surface but not its interior. The surface of the material has a ten times larger thermal conductivity to electrical conductivity ratio. The research was published in the journal ACS Nano.

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.

When Eric Nauman got the call from Purdue Sports Medicine, he was ready.

This earwig's wing is an origami marvel of the animal kingdom. In research just published in the journal Science, Andres Arrieta shows how Purdue Engineering and ETH Zürich studied and re-created this bio-inspired origami for human use.