Rising material costs, lack of quality control, labour shortages, challenging climates and significant on-site waste continue to be the challenges encountered by the Canadian construction industry. The collaboration between the research team and NEXII will develop the technical know-how for the new generation building panel products to address these challenges. The new NEXII panel is a three-layer composite “sandwich” structure consisting of an expanded polystyrene insulation (EPS) core between two layers of Nexiite, an innovative material produced by NEXII.

Lift stations are an underground utility transporting wastewater from residential or commercial sources to wastewater treatment plants. Lift stations are defined as a post-disaster structure according to national building code of Canada, which are required to remain operational immediately after earthquakes. A wealth of evidence from historical post-earthquake reconnaissance has confirmed the excellent performance of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) pipelines under earthquakes.

An integrated methodology and platform are proposed to improve circular engineering of the built environment to reduce construction waste, carbon emissions, and costs associated with the adaptation of dated existing buildings. Novel design methodologies and technologies are explored for optimizing design option generation using various spatial, environmental and economic factors simultaneously.

Bacterial cultures are sometimes added to groundwater to increase the rate of degradation of contaminants. Three cultures that are able to completely biodegrade their primary compound to non-toxic end products in the absence of oxygen have been enriched from contaminated soils. The goal of this project is to demonstrate the efficacy of these cultures in a controlled field experiment. High resolution temporal and spatial data will be collected to estimate degradation rates, and support a process level understanding.

As a solution to reduce congestion on vehicular roads and mitigate longer travelling times, this technology provides the most optimal routes for drivers by guaranteeing the shortest travel time in an eco-friendly environment. The technology relies on communication to road-side intelligent intersection agents with embedded sensors that to estimate routes based on the real-time road link traffic status. The system is capable to distribute traffic in an efficient manner to control and coordinate vehicular movements.

Prefabricated construction, as an alternative to the traditional stick-built construction, has its advantages in shortening the schedules and reduce onsite construction exposure. The prefabricated construction components are often produced in offsite controlled environment and shipped to site for installation. Due to its similarity to manufacturing, prefabricated construction provides opportunities for continuous productivity improvements. Through such improvements, production data is required and critical to construct analytical models for measuring progresses.

Underground metro infrastructures are subjected to different types of dynamic loads that would hinder their ability to function properly. This proposed research aims to assess the risks of city-scale underground tunnel networks under both periodic human-induced vibrations (i.e., blasting and drilling vibrations) and short-term extreme earthquake hazards. We will develop a GIS model for the tunnel soil/rock profiles in Montreal by synthesizing a comprehensive dataset for tunnel designs, embedment depths, and soil/rock properties from geotechnical surveys.

Ground movement can impose excessive deformation violating pertinent pipeline limit states. Currently, the integrity assessment of pipelines subjected to soil movement is generally performed by analyzing the stresses and/or strains in pipelines using various engineering techniques, including finite element analysis (FEA). However, given the wide variability of the pipe and soil engineering properties, using deterministic approaches alone may be inadequate.

Industries around the world have been leaning towards cleaner solutions to mitigate their environmental footprint. IT is one industry that has been rapidly growing during the recent past. Hence, it is important to enhance the environmental performance of IT solutions through a life cycle thinking lens. Eco-efficiency evaluation enables analyzing the environmental and economic performance of a product in focus and has been a popular ratio for comparing alternative products. This research performs eco-efficiency assessment for cybersecurity solutions.

Canada is the third largest exporter and the fourth largest producer of oil in the world. Thus, oil is a very important part of the Canadian economy. Oil is a cleaner fuel than coal, but it still has many disadvantages. For example, oil spills that occurs during transport and drilling can cause great environmental damage. Oil spills into oceans are harmful to marine mammals and birds as well as shellfish and fish.