October 2015 - Purdue University’s aerospace district research complex, established in September as part of the West Lafayette, Indiana, campus, won’t actually “be about bricks and mortar,” says Purdue Research Foundation President Dan Hasler. “It will be about the intellectual capital.”

One major endeavor he cites is how to generate a low-energy plasma field. 

“It’s an energy field over a surface. The reason you want it over an airfoil is that it causes wind to flow more smoothly and prevents the effects of turbulence. Turbulence reduces lift. You want air to be straight passing over the wing. It is hard to get that [smoothness] at high speeds. So you establish an plasma energy field, which lifts air 30 to 50 percent better.”

However, Hasler says, it takes a great deal of energy to create a plasma field on a wing,  “more than you save by having the field, so our people are working on creating it with a far lower energy requirement.

“When they figure this out,” he predicts, the aviation industry will realize “higher fuel efficiency, the ability to fly faster and deploy smaller wings.” By using this technology, blades on windmills and propellers on marine craft will become more efficient, too.

Just three people out of 4,000 researchers at Purdue are working on this task. But this is the kind of work that keeps people coming to the university, he says.

“We filed 415 patents last year and we were issued 178 patents. That represented a ranking of 16 in the world in terms of patent production,” Hasler says. Purdue licensed 241 technologies to 106 established companies and 25 startup companies licensed Purdue technologies. “They once called this the cradle of astronauts. It’s now the cradle of commerce for exactly these reasons.” MM