Innovative Projects Realized

Optical properties and climate impact of wildfire emissions

Biomass burning is the largest source of carbonaceous aerosol in the atmosphere. Biomass burning aerosol can alter the Earth’s radiative balance by absorption and scattering of solar radiation, resulting in a significant impact on global climate. However, because of the complexity of biomass burning aerosol, the magnitude of this climate effect is still uncertain. The goal of this project is to measure the optical properties of aerosol in North American wildfire plumes during the Summer 2019 fire season, and thereby contribute to our understanding of the influence of wildfires on climate. The project will be conducted as part of FIREX-AQ, a major aircraft measurement campaign.
By using the state-of-the-art instrumentation, I will measure the absorption and extinction of wildfire aerosol both at the point of emission and downwind to see how these properties change with transport. The microphysical properties of aerosol, such as size, shape, mass absorption coefficient, and composition will also be measured in the campaign to see their correlations with aerosol optical properties. This knowledge will contribute to improvements in the calculation and modeling of biomass burning aerosol radiative properties and ultimately to improve our understanding of the climate impact of North American wildfires.

Process Intensification for Odor Removal in Composting Facilities

Composting is a method of waste management using biological degradation at aerobic condition. Although the process is one of the efficient and least expensive waste management options, nuisance odors emanating from waste processing facilities degrade the air quality of neighborhood. Odor compounds vary significantly depending on the type of wastes, process conditions and include bioaerosols, biomolecules, volatile organics, ammonia, and organic sulphur compounds. Of all the mitigation technologies available for odor control, adsorption on activated carbon or other highly active surfaces, and biofilter are most efficient. In this work, a process intensification using two technologies, namely adsorption and chemical oxidation will be attempted in a single unit for the removal of model odor compounds. The two adsorbents are prepared from waste materials namely petroleum coke and biochar. This collaboration will help the partnering company, Renewi Canada, to mitigate odor problems by augmenting their existing scrubber and biofilter technologies.

Fault injection framework to study the soft error resilience of FPGA based systems

Soft errors are known to have a significant impact on circuit reliability. When high energy particles from either cosmic rays or packaging materials strike a semiconductor substrate, they generate charge which in turn results in a glitch or a transient current in a circuit. Such a glitch is called the single event transient (SET). The SET can occur on a register or on a logic gate in a circuit and can propagate to eventually get captured in a register, altering the stored bit. Such an error is known as a single event upset (SEU) or soft error.
FPGAs are widely used in applications such as industrial, aircrafts, space crafts, high-end computing systems due to their high performance, easy reconfigurability, quick time to market and low cost. FPGA-based designs are more susceptible to soft errors compared to ASIC designs as they contain more memory elements. Soft error rate (SER) estimation is a crucial step in the design of soft error tolerant schemes to attain the required reliability and performance of the system. Existing studies focus mainly on single bit-upsets and mitigation schemes. TBC

Larval Ecology of the Invasive European common blue butterfly in Quebec

The European common blue butterfly was first spotted in Quebec and has since become well-established in open habitats and disturbed areas around Montreal. In late summer and early fall, it is one of the most abundant butterflies.

This project aims first to set up laboratory breeding of the European common blue and second to test whether symbiosis with local ants helps the caterpillars survive in their new North American habitat.

Many caterpillars in the blue butterfly family form symbiotic relationships with ants: the catepillar secrete nectar to feed the ants and the ants protect the caterpillars (and refrain from eating them themselves). We will use caterpillars from our lab colonies to test whether ants, particulary European ants introduced to Canada many years ago, protect the invasive caterpillars.
This project forms the first step of a longer-term research programme on a new invasive species about which virtually nothing is known. Biological invasions are one of the main processes of global change currently affecting ecosystems around the world. This project is both locally important in understanding a new player in the biodiversity of southern Quebec, ..TBC

Impacts of built environments to human well-being

Research and implementation of Haptics Device Integration with a Dynamics Simulation Engine and Applications to Milling and Drilling Force Feedback

Virtual environments represented by multibody system models play an important role in many applications. Adding the possibility of users directly interacting with such environments via physical touch using haptics can significantly enhance the usability and range of application of simulated environments. In this project we particularly target two main objectives: (1) the multirate-simulation and hatics challenge to incorporate realistic kinesthetic force feedback in multibody dynamics simulation of gemoetrically complex mechanical systems, and (2) application to millling and drilling bone in spinal surgery simulation. The partner organization, CMLabs will greatly benefit from this project. The proposed work is of direct relevance to their current work, and will also open up possibilities to broaden the applications of CMLabs’ software platform, Vortex.

Conception d’une procédure automatisée permettant de récupérer et d’intégrer les informations nécessaires pour cartographier le potentiel de lotissement de secteurs urbains déjà bâtis ou terrains vacants (LOT_VAL)

Ce projet s’insère dans un contexte où la densification urbaine est une préoccupation grandissante afin de réduire l’étalement urbain et ainsi s’aligner avec les principes du développement durable. Il vise à concevoir une procédure automatisée permettant de récupérer et d’intégrer les informations nécessaires pour cartographier le potentiel de lotissement de secteurs urbains déjà bâtis ou terrains vacants. La procédure est testée sur le secteur de la ville de Québec.

Development of machine learning and artificial intelligence toolbox to monitor data center risks and performance

Missing Link Technologies Ltd. provides customized and effective solutions to its partners for their IT infrastructure & operations. They are especially involved with solving the IT facilities management challenges of Telcos and Datacenters. The proposed research in collaboration with Missing Link Technologies Ltd. is aimed at leveraging the advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence in risk management, performance assessment and availability prediction of a data center. A suite of tools and techniques will be proposed towards this end. The research will also propose a framework to make the proposed tools available to any other businesses that wants to address similar problems. The research and resulting insights is expected to result significant reduction in operation cost and improved availability of services thus benefiting both the industry collaborator and the customers.

Studying the Impact of Performance Issues on End Users

Performance assurance activities are an essential step in the release cycle of large software systems. However, prior research on software performance often does not consider the impact on end users; while developers may miss performance issues that lowers the satisfaction rate of end users, or the effort is spent on fixing those issues that may not impact end users much. The goal of the proposed research is to help software practitioners better understand and cope with performance issues by considering their impact on the end users. In particular, I propose to conduct empirical studies on the impact of end users from existing performance bugs and build statistical models to gain deeper understanding of such impact. The findings are expected to provide new insights around performance issues across different programming languages and software systems.

Development of Reactors for Fuel Synthesis from Hydrogen and Carbon Dioxide

Utilization of Agile Management in Construction Projects

Usually, any construction project begins with the planning department preparing a construction schedule that is pushed onto the project team. The big up-front plan might cause delays in the construction process because it relies on predicting a lot in the future, so you need frequent updating of this plan throughout the execution. Agile is a project management approach that includes micro-planning tools to support construction contractors in the execution of projects. This is accomplished through short feedback loops which involve all the project team members and stakeholders to embrace and document the changes and unexpected issues that arise and how they are dealt with. The application of agile management in construction projects can lead to numerous benefits. To begin with, feedback loops are short and mistakes are fixed once they are discovered. Further, the process will involve lower risks because the client is continuously involved in the development process. Construction companies can focus more on time management and regular frequent reviews to improve project financial management.

Swarm algorithms for Quadcopters: from simulation to reality