Due to the length and intrinsic flexibility of cable-supported bridges, wind causes serious challenges to designers of such structures. To ensure the safety of these bridges, it is common practice to test scale models of bridges in the wind tunnel. As bridges are getting longer, simplifications used for typical wind tunnel test become questionable. Therefore, this project aims at developing a new type of wind tunnel tests for bridges in order to check whether these simplifications are safe for very long bridges.
Most people would like to continue living in their own homes as they age. A new ecosystem is needed to enable home health technologies to be developed, tested and successfully commercialized. This will require a program that provides a low-cost way for developers to test their products before introduction to the market. Therefore, in our Program to Accelerate Technologies for Homecare (PATH), the intern will develop a novel versatile connection protocol that will connect different devices and sensors to a single hub.
The goal of our proposal is to develop three automated processes in the field of construction using artificial intelligence. The first process is to develop a method that can convert two-dimensional drawings into three-dimensional models that can be further manipulated on a computer. The second process is to optimize the cutting of raw materials-- such as panels and stiffeners-- to reduce the overall wastage, as well as optimize the transportation process of these materials to the resulting construction site.
Construction projects always include incidents that may cause the labors injuries or even death. To mitigate the consequences of these incidents the labors are required to comply with a series safety advises and requirements that are forced by institutional guidelines. They are supposed to use personal protective equipment (PPE) such as hard hat and vest. However, sometimes correct usage of these equipment is neglected by the workers and construction managers and field engineers need to oversee them.
This project seeks to understand the impact of translocation on freshwater mussel communities due to river infrastructure works in the Grand River, Ontario, Canada. We will determine the recovery of mussel communities post-translocation, and place them into context with similar translocations from across the region. The work will involve new empirical data on mussel recovery from the initial relocation in 2020 to 3 years post-relocation.
Permeable Reactive Barrier (PRB) is an in situ permeable treatment zone designed to capture and remediate a contaminant plume. PRBs have become important components among the various technologies available to remediate groundwater contamination and are now a standard in the remediation industry. Grafta®; an in-house patented technology provided by Comnipex is a novel material that has not been commercially applied within a PRB context.
Over the years, numerous techniques and additives have been employed to increase soil strength and stability – from filling a bog with stones or other fill to compacting the soil with heavy machinery or mixing soil with cement or lime and allowing the resulting mix to harden. Duraflex Solutions Ltd has a new, environmentally-friendly product named DFI for stabilizing weak soils. DFI has worked well in Europe and is processed by simply mixing the top layer of the soil with the product and leaving the mix to harden.
One of the important concerns in the oil and gas industry, as in many other fields, is making sure that work processes comply with the industry-specific regulations, guidelines and standards. These standards cover a plethora of requirements, from managing equipment and people, to conducting work processes that minimally impact the environment and ecosystems. For Canada, these guidelines are different among provinces.
Geothermal energy is a promising source of renewable energy and is gradually gaining attention in application in building heating and cooling system. Standing column wells (SCW) are an efficient way of harnessing geothermal energy for such building applications. However, currently rule-based controllers are used for these geothermal heating-cooling systems with simplifying assumptions to avoid the inherent complexities of the system dynamics.
The main problem being addressed is the current lack of control and quality in the deposition of mixed mortar in the application of large-scale 3D printing. This is a significant issue because the properties of the mixes used depend heavily on the material ratios and mixing/pumping time. This means that slight variations can lead to blockages in the system or even collapse of the intended printed items.
Current 3D Concrete printing system use many different mix/pumping systems. Two system which are very popular are the MTEC Duo Mix 2000 Connect from MTEC, MAI®MULTIMIX-3D.
