In the news

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.

Purdue University has launched the Center for Secure Microelectronics Ecosystem (CSME) with support from industry partners and a U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)-funded workforce development program. CSME is a first-of-its-kind global partnership of academia, industry and government to advance research and workforce development in designing secure microelectronics. Its aim is to help ensure a secure supply of semiconductor chips and related products and tools, from the foundry to the packaged system, based on a zero-trust model. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), one of the world’s largest semiconductor contract manufacturers, is an industry partner.

Two Purdue researchers have been selected as Quantum Information Science and Engineering Network (QISE-NET) triplet awardees. The “triplets” – a group consisting of a university principal investigator, an industrial or national laboratory mentor, and a graduate student – come from a variety of disciplines relevant to advancing the development of quantum technologies such as materials science, chemistry, device engineering, physics, computer science and industrial research. Prospective candidates were required to submit a short and focused proposal that represents leading-edge research topics in quantum information science/engineering with potential for growth and follow-on work between the student, company or national laboratory and academic groups.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – New contact lens technology to help diagnose and monitor medical conditions may soon be ready for clinical trials. A team of researchers from Purdue University worked with biomedical, mechanical and chemical engineers, along with clinicians, to develop the novel technology. The team enabled commercial soft contact lenses to be a bioinstrumentation tool for unobtrusive monitoring of clinically important information associated with underlying ocular health conditions. The team’s work is published in Nature Communications. The Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization helped secure a patent for the technology, and it is available for licensing.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – If you want power, you lose battery life. If you want battery life, you lose power. That’s the situation facing users of most electronic devices – and it’s also the dilemma for electronics manufacturers. Purdue University innovators have come up with an invention to help. “Battery life technology, for the most part, has not been able to keep up with the other technology that requires the battery,” said Saeed Mohammadi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering in Purdue’s College of Engineering. “Complementary metal-oxide semiconductor [CMOS] is a battery-powered semiconductor chip inside computers and devices that stores information. CMOS requires a lot of power from the computer which, in turn, reduces the battery life.”

“You see, nature is unpredictable. How do you expect to predict it with a computer?” said American physicist Richard Feynman before computer scientists at a conference in 1981. Forty years later, Purdue University engineers are building the kind of system that Feynman imagined would overcome the limitations of today’s classical computers by more closely acting like nature: a “probabilistic computer.” The team believes that a probabilistic computer may sooner solve some of the problems a quantum computer would solve, since it wouldn’t need entirely new hardware or extremely cold temperatures to operate. On that list of problems to solve more efficiently than with classical computers are optimization problems – the ability to calculate the best solution from a very large number of solutions, such as identifying the best route for goods to travel to market.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – IdentifySensors Biologics, a Purdue University-affiliated technology firm developing a rapid diagnostic platform for detecting pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, has entered into a new partnership with Purdue Research Foundation and will open an office in Purdue’s Discovery Park District. As the COVID-19 pandemic was about to break around the globe, IdentifySensors, the parent company of IdentifySensors Biologics, had approached Purdue to help it develop a nanosensor designed to detect spoilage and specific pathogens in the food supply chain. When the pandemic became apparent, the company pivoted to start working with Purdue researcher Lia Stanciu, associate head and professor of materials engineering, to develop a rapid diagnostic platform for detecting SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Zubin Jacob, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, has won the Indian Institute of Technology - Bombay Young Alumni Achiever Award 2021. This honor is given to exceptional IITB alumni from around the world below the age of 40. Jacob is being recognized for exceptional contributions in academia to the field of Photonics. The award winners are from diverse fields including academia, industry, start-ups, arts and entertainment, as well as social service. Jacob is one of five recipients in 2021.