Extractives and various polymers found in wood pulp have deleterious impacts on a number of industrial processes, as well as on papermaking productivity. Such impacts have to be considered too in the emerging field of biorefining (production or extraction of high value products from forest biomass). The main partner to this project (Buckman Canada) has successfully introduced enzymes to the paper industry, but would like to expand its offering to the forest industry as a whole.
This project was in partnership with CRIAQ. In the aerospace industry, the actual practice to support thin parts during machining is to use dedicated fixtures with curved surfaces that match the ones of the work pieces. This requires a large inventory of fixtures which is costly in terms of design and manufacturing as well as in terms of shop floor space. This project will focus on the study of part fixtures in order to propose flexible (and affordable) fixture configurations for the machining of thin composite laminates.
This project is in partnership with CRIAQ. The trimming process of the CFRP and the multilayer material (CFRP/Aluminum/Titanium) needs to be studied in terms of the resulting quality of produced parts but also in terms of cost considering cutting tool life and time of operation. For the quality aspect, the responses measured include the evaluation of tool wear, delaminating factor Df with cracks and thermal affected matrix estimation, the surface roughness as well as the dimensional and geometric errors of the given trimmed features.
Polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells have great potential for mobile and stationary power applications. For such applications, this type of fuel cell must be capable of operating at a high power density with an ultra-low content of electrocatalyst to reduce its weight, volume and cost. Presently, the cost of this fuel cell is too high and this remains a major hindrance for commercialization. Thus, this proposed research addresses this issue with a novel Pt-sputtering based on mono or multi-layers of carbon material as anode.
