Dr. Nusrat Jung presents zEDGE Tiny House from Purdue University's Lyles School of Civil Engineering

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From Purdue Newsroom: At just 192 square feet, Purdue University’s newest civil engineering laboratory is remarkably small for a research space. Yet, Purdue professor Nusrat Jung has big plans for it.

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The laboratory comes in the form of a tiny house, called zEDGE, that Jung and a team of students designed and engineered for testing the energy efficiency of large structures on a small scale. Built on a trailer for easy mobility, zEDGE (pronounced “zee-edge”) is stationed outside Hampton Hall on Purdue’s West Lafayette campus.

Jung envisions zEDGE, which stands for zero-Energy Design Guidance for Engineers, as an ideal working laboratory — and much more.

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While building a fun but practical teaching lab was the primary material goal of the zEDGE project, the members of the Purdue team had sustainability and future populations in mind while completing it. All four students were selected from a zero-energy building course Jung taught during her first semester at the University.

“Just knowing that this could be something for the future definitely left an impact on all of us,” [Purdue graduate student] Motasem Qadan says. “This isn’t everybody’s future, but it’s part of it. It’s about small steps, small changes, small things. You find yourself thinking, ‘This could solve a lot of issues, this could be a game-changer, this could help save the planet.’ ”

 

This introduction has been adapted from Aaron Martin's article for the Purdue Newsroom.