In the news

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – When the COVID-19 pandemic began and the technologies necessary to combat it came into focus, testing was immediately identified as being top on the list. Mohit Verma, assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering, had been working for years on developing a diagnostic tool to detect Bovine Respiratory Disease (BRD) in cattle using nasal swabs. Verma and his colleagues identified nucleic acids specific to different pathogens that cause the disease and developed a paper-based testing device that was cheap to manufacture, accessible and accurate. “When COVID-19 hit, that’s exactly the type of testing technologies we needed,” Verma said, and he quickly pivoted his research to developing a scalable testing technology for COVID-19.

WEST LAFAYETTE - The Discovery Park District at Purdue University has announced a partnership related to Internet of Things technology. The district is teaming up with the university's SMART Consortium in an effort to advance IoT technology and study how it will be used. The SMART Consortium is a multi-disciplinary research center in the Birck Nanotechnology Center on the West Lafayette campus. Ali Shakouri, director of the Birck center, says the consortium is a foundry for IoT development. “A foundry is a shared developmental manufacturing facility, and they were vital to the rapid growth of Silicon Valley," Shakouri said. "At the district, we envision a foundry dedicated to supporting the fast development of low-cost, high-volume IoT devices and use cases – generating faster product development pilot runs and lower cost per unit – making innovation much more accessible and affordable.”

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — It is commonly known that two types of fundamental particles make up the universe: bosons and fermions. Bosons and fermions behave very differently due to fundamentally different statistical properties. Forty years ago, theorists predicted that a new class of particle, anyons, that have distinct statistical properties may exist in nature as well. The problem is that there was no direct observation of an anyon’s unique statistical properties. That is until 2020 when a team from Purdue University led Dr. Michael Manfra published findings in Nature Physics which demonstrated concrete evidence of the existence of anyons.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Researchers have detected the rolling movement of a nano-acoustic wave predicted by the famous physicist and Nobel prize winner Lord Rayleigh in 1885. This phenomenon can find applications in acoustic quantum technologies or in so-called “phononic” components, which are used to control the propagation of acoustic waves. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, was conducted by researchers from Purdue University, the University of Augsburg, the University of Münster and the University of Alberta.

Imagine a future in which farmers manage crops with the touch of a tablet. “I have this vision of what it would look like,” says Nadia Shakoor, senior research scientist at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Missouri. Drones fly over fields, sending alerts at the first sign of insect pests. Robots roll past crops, identifying disease. Soil sensors trigger water to spray only where crops are parched. The farmer, tablet in hand, remains at the helm—without being so tethered to the land. Maybe farmers sit on porches, says Shakoor, or “they are on a beach in Florida, and they are monitoring their farm.”

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — As smartwatches become more powerful, they will generate more heat. To prevent burns or rashes, what if a material touching the skin could feel as cool as metal, but also be flexible enough to be worn on the wrist? A team of Purdue University engineers has discovered that a type of fabric typically used for hiking gear has remarkable heat-conducting properties on par with stainless steel, potentially leading to wearable electronics that successfully cool both the device and the wearer’s skin. The material is made of ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene fibers, which are sold commercially under the brand name Dyneema. These polymer-based fabrics are marketed for their high strength, durability and abrasion resistance, and are often used to create body armor, specialty sports gear, ropes and nets.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The Stone Age. The Bronze Age. The Iron Age. The Industrial Revolution. Eras tend to be defined by their technology, and humans may be headed for a new one: the Quantum Age.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Making fresh water out of seawater usually requires huge amounts of energy. The most widespread process for desalination is called reverse osmosis, which works by flowing seawater over a membrane at high pressure to remove the minerals. Now, Purdue University engineers have developed a variant of the process called “batch reverse osmosis,” which promises better energy efficiency, longer-lasting equipment and the ability to process water of much higher salinity. It could end up a difference-maker in water security around the world. Reverse osmosis is used in many countries; in arid places like the Middle East, more than half of the fresh drinking water supplies come from desalination facilities. But to maintain the high level of pressure required for the process – up to 70 times atmospheric pressure – a desalination plant must employ large numbers of pumps and other equipment. And that uses a lot of energy.

Purdue University has won 1st place in the Marine Energy Collegiate Competition, a contest sponsored by the US Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). The design competition asked students to create a project that utilized marine energy technologies in a real-world setting.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — In an effort to curb global warming, Purdue University engineers have created the whitest paint yet. Coating buildings with this paint may one day cool them off enough to reduce the need for air conditioning, the researchers say. In October, the team created an ultra-white paint that pushed limits on how white paint can be. Now they’ve outdone that. The newer paint not only is whiter but also can keep surfaces cooler than the formulation that the researchers had previously demonstrated. “If you were to use this paint to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet, we estimate that you could get a cooling power of 10 kilowatts. That’s more powerful than the central air conditioners used by most houses,” said Xiulin Ruan, a Purdue professor of mechanical engineering.