Projets novateurs réalisés

Developing novel heat recovery and thermal management system for air cooled electric vehicles

This project attempts to design an efficient waste heat recovery and thermal management system for air-cooled electric vehicles. The thermal management system will be useful for the small electric vehicles to control the optimal temperature in the cabin and battery bank operating under diverse climatic conditions varying from extremely cold to hot. The successful accomplishment of the project will help the partner to commercialize small electric trucks converted from used gas cars. The intended use of these electric trucks is for contractors, servicemen, utilities, and municipalities. Such vehicles can help Canada to reduce GHG emissions by reducing the use of heavy gas trucks by the end-users. Further, it promotes sustainable use of existing old gas cars, thus cutting the GHG emissions from the production of such vehicles.

Canadian Architectural Education, Accreditation, and Certification trends in a Changing Environment – Phase 2

This project – Canadian Architectural Education, Accreditation, and Licensing trends in a Changing Environment – partners with the Canadian Architectural Certification Board (CACB) to comparatively analyze quantitative and qualitative data concerning challenges and opportunities facing academic and professional sectors in Canada. The intention is to better understand past changes, current states, and future trajectories so that these education and practice sectors can better prepare for new challenges, and collaboratively strategize goals to improve services and the built environment for all Canadians.

Founded in 1976, CACB is a national independent nonprofit corporation that develops, implements, and maintains programs and standards for certification required for the practice of architecture in Canada. CACB receives its mandate from the Regulator Organizations of Architecture in Canada (ROAC, previously, CALA), and the Canadian Council of University Schools of Architecture (CCUSA). In 2017, CACB added research to its mandate. The present Phase 2 research advances this mandate by extending preliminary work completed in a Phase project completed in 2018.

Automation of Electromagnetics Production

In this project, we will analyze and design automated solutions to achieve several repetitive and labour-intensive tasks included in the industrial partner’s electromagnetic component production process, which will help compensate for current and future personnel shortages and enable the expansion of their custom production methods without expanding their facility. The main challenges in this project include object detection, grasping and manipulation of small components, and integration into an existing production process that is currently heavily dependent on manual labour and expertise.

The components to be handled in this process are custom electromagnetic components that are designed and produced in-house, which vary in both scale and complexity from batch to batch. This project requires the successful detection, grasping, movement, and manipulation of various sizes and shapes of components for the purposes of both applying coatings and encapsulation as well as tinning and soldering their wire leads. There are several key challenges in this project related to the detection and handling of the components.

This project also includes the need for advanced optical sensing solutions (e.g., laser, infrared, video) to perform a visual inspection of the components for quality assurance at various steps throughout the production process.

Implicit Particle-In-Cell Plasma Model Development for D-Pace’s TRIUMF Licensed Filament-Powered Volume-Cusp H¯ Ion Source

Ion sources are important for TRIUMF Canada’s national particle accelerator laboratory, as they are a key sub-system in the
TRIUMF 500 MeV Cyclotron which is used for world-class fundamental discovery science, and cutting-edge technology
development and transfer to the medical and industrial sectors. D-Pace is a spin-off of TRIUMF, and is a global leader in
developing, manufacturing, selling, and implementing ion source sub-systems around the world for industrial applications
(semiconductor production), for medical uses (radiopharmaceutical production), and for discovery science applications in
national laboratories. Implicit Particle-In-Cell plasma modelling techniques are innovative and cutting-edge techniques to
computer model an ion source plasma. It is important to quantitatively model the characteristics of ion sources so that we may
understand how they work internally, and how we might improve them for certain future new specification requirements for
medicine, industry, and discovery science ie more beam current may be required in future for these applications, and such
models will assist in figuring how to achieve this. Both TRIUMF and D-Pace will significantly benefit from this implicit Particle-
In-Cell software development work.

Development and Optimization technique for the application of Organic fish hydrolysate fertilizer on various plant types

Eberts Farm, in partnership with Lambton College will be investigating the different applications and concentrations of an organic fish based fertilizer on the growth of microgreens and greenhouse crops. Eberts has previously developed an organic fertilizer and now requires concrete data to back up very promising preliminary findings. This research will benefit Eberts with the ability to make claims about the product as well as providing the consumer with recommended usage guidelines.

French Shore Embroidery Kit Social Venture

The project aims to development a series of embroidery kits from one of our exhibits, the Treaty of Utrecht. Four historical images as well as one new image created by our intern will be produced and sold in the form of embroidery kits four our Gift Shop at the French Shore Interpretation Centre as part of a social venture.

Corporate Partnerships Program Development at Planeterra

Planeterra recently began onboarding new corporate partnerships beyond G Adventures, and already has new partners on board that want to support our work and visit more community tourism enterprises. Developing this new program will require support in mapping out the workflow and specifics of a formal corporate partner program based on past learnings. This project will address how to better access data from community partners that will be instrumental in pitching and promoting their enterprises to corporate partners. The overall goal of this project is to develop systems and strategies that will increase Planeterra’s organizational capacity in delivering value to its community and corporate partners in this new program delivery area.

Neuroptek – Online Eye Examination Platform

The partner organization’s primary stakeholder, Dr. Behzad Mansouri is a domain expert in the field of clinical eye examinations and their relationship to brain health. Dr. Mansouri knows the applications that are necessary to provide those in remote areas with access to health care related to his field, but does not have the means to produce the technology without assistance.
The production of a successful deployment of this application would be an operational pivot for the organization. Patients in remote areas would not have to travel to see an eye specialist, and individuals living in countries where access to specialists are non-existent could be serviced. This would expand the scope of patients for Dr. Mansouri and other physicians using this application.
The next iteration of this project would represent the third iteration. The first iteration was new development to design a means of having patients interact with phone technology in order to perform eye examinations in a remote setting. The second iteration was a refinement and expansion of some of the functionality found in iteration one. The student intern team successfully created a visual acuity test, a visual range test and a test for color blindness.

Linguistic Cues for Heuristic Determination of Patterns of Speech in Noise

This project aims to investigate the benefits of using linguistic cues for extracting speech-of-interest from competing background noise. Given an algorithm which detects formants of a speaker of interest within an audio signal which includes background noise, and given that the limits of such an approach are reached when formants of the speaker of interest become substantially lost within the noise, are there linguistic cues within some formants, or linguistic relationships between some successive speech sounds, which can be used to infer with confidence which speech sounds from the speaker of interest are present beneath the noise floor of a noisy audio signal. The partner organization will benefit from this internship by extending the range of solutions it can offer to the market. If the proposed solution proves to be useful and novel, the partner organization will apply for patent protection. This could lead to increased sales and the additional employment within the company.

Data, Analytics, Visualization and Streaming

Interaction Concepts for Remote Robot Exploration in Crisis Scenarios using Virtual Reality

Building Information Modeling (BIM) for Energy-Efficient Building Operations