Projets novateurs réalisés

Simulation of the foamy oil flow during the solution gas drive production of heavy oils

Foamy oil behavior is a unique phenomenon associated with cold production of heavy crude oils. It is believed that the foaming mechanism has a significant impact on the abnormally high production rate of viscous crude oils observed in many heavy oil producing reservoirs through solution gas drive.
Due to the non-equilibrium nature of the foamy oil flow, the mathematical modeling of this process involves few challenges. The main non-equilibrium process exist between solution gas and free gas that leads to a significant supersaturation of dissolved gas in the oil phase. Even though different models on foamy-oil behavior with a diverse experimental data are available in literature, there is scarcity of published experimental data for a heavy oil reservoir with a Canadian origin. This research will be focused on developing a kinetic model which is developed and tuned for a heavy oil reservoir with a Canadian origin.TO BE CONT’D

The Smart Bed Co-Innovation Project: An Industry-Partnered Initiative to Improve Patient Experience, Quality of Care, and Staff Workload Using Emerging Non-Intrusive Technologies

Information technologies that can provide health professionals detailed patient information in ‘real time’ can improve

patient experience, quality of care, and staff workload. However, to date, Canada’s health care system has been challenged

by limited adoption and implementation of new information technologies that hold great promise for achieving health

system transformation. To address these challenges, the Ivey International Centre for Health Innovation and Hewlett-

Packard Labs have formed a collaborative partnership along with Humber River Regional Hospital in Toronto, ON. The

proposed research will engage academic and industry researchers, information technology leaders, key decision-makers and

end-users (clinicians and patients/families) in co-creating, implementing, and testing out next generation HP information

technologies in the form of Smart Beds. The Smart Bed project envisions equipping patient rooms with highly sensitive

prototype accelerometers and related detection subsystems in an effort to demonstrate the types of patient level data contact pressure, vital signs) and information (e.g. falls, excessive/lack of movement, sleeping patterns, pain….

Modeling of the Wear Performance of Carbide-Based Overlays and Coatings

Surface degradation during Oil & Gas and Mining operations in the Province of Alberta are pervasive. This has resulted in extensive research and development activities into the development of advanced surface modifications that are based on overlays and coatings. Most research effort has focused on materials selection, fabrication, and optimization of wear performance of those modifications through experimentation, trial-and-error, and microstructural analysis. This proposed research project has been designed with a view to developing advanced modelling solutions that will result in a priori prediction of wear and erosion behavior of select overlay and coating systems. By developing such solutions in collaboration with the partner organization, InnoTech Alberta, the applicants expect that the partner organization will be able to select and test the performance of appropriate overlay and coatings materials without incurring significant costs and will be able to deploy suitable overlay and coating solutions efficiently into the stream of commerce.

Low-cost Real-time Multi-constellation GNSS Precise Point Positioning for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) – Year two

Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) enables smart traffic management and provides various innovative services including better safety, more road information, etc., which has drawn a lot of attention. The development of next-generation ITS services and applications must depend on more accurate positioning information at decimeter to even centimeter-level. Such capabilities are crucial because all of the innovative applications are based on the precise positioning of land vehicles. For example, for Vehicle-To-Vehicle (V2V), an automobile technology designed to allow automobiles to communicate with each other to avoid traffic accidents and improve the traffic efficiency. The V2V technology has been extended to V2X to include Vehicle-to-Pedestrian, Vehicle-to-Infrastructure and Vehicle-to-Pedestrian. These innovative technologies and the emerging autonomous cars are becoming significant components of next-generation ITS systems. Without the accurate positioning information as the foundation, the mentioned technologies are impossible to be achieved. TO BE CONT’D

Low-cost Real-time Multi-constellation GNSS Precise Point Positioning for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS)

Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) enables smart traffic management and provides various innovative services including better safety, more road information, etc., which has drawn a lot of attention. The development of next-generation ITS services and applications must depend on more accurate positioning information at decimeter to even centimeter-level. Such capabilities are crucial because all of the innovative applications are based on the precise positioning of land vehicles. For example, for Vehicle-To-Vehicle (V2V), an automobile technology designed to allow automobiles to communicate with each other to avoid traffic accidents and improve the traffic efficiency. The V2V technology has been extended to V2X to include Vehicle-to-Pedestrian, Vehicle-to-Infrastructure and Vehicle-to-Pedestrian. These innovative technologies and the emerging autonomous cars are becoming significant components of next-generation ITS systems. Without the accurate positioning information as the foundation, the mentioned technologies are impossible to be achieved. TO BE CONT’D

Catalytic Heavy Oil Upgrading under Methane Environment

The proposed research is focused on designing and optimizing novel catalysts that catalyze the activation of methane, the principal component of natural gas, to upgrade heavy oil, and obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the involved reaction mechanism. Heavy oil is upgraded to meet the pipeline transportation requirements, while methane is incorporated to the formed synthetic crude at lowered temperature and pressure (<5 MPa). Compared with commonly practiced hydrotreating process, which consumes hydrogen originating from the steam reforming of methane, the operating cost, energy consumption and CO2 emission are reduced in the proposed approach. On the other side, methane finds its way to be incorporated to the value added liquid products. The catalysts are metal modified nano porous materials, which allow flexible product selectivity by applying post-synthetic treatment to the support materials and modifying the condition of metal species. TO BE CONT'D

Nanostructured cathode material for high performance all-solid-state sodium battery – Year two

Lithium batteries are almost universally integrated in modern electronics applications due to their high efficiency and scalability. However, the liquid lithium-ion electrolyte utilized in these batteries has a multitude of safety concerns including flammability, toxicity, and the ability to explode if short-circuited. These issues lead to problems while operating in hazardous environments, more stringent transportation regulations, and pose a threat to the personal safety of consumers. Geometric Energy Corporation is working in conjunction with the Thangadurai Group to address these problems by developing an all-solid-state sodium-ion battery system. This system will be non-flammable, non-explosive, and non-toxic, eliminating these issues that are present in liquid-lithium batteries. Our battery technology will be applicable anywhere a liquid-lithium-ion battery is currently used, including the electric vehicle sector, personal electronics, and grid-scale applications. TO BE CONT’D

Optimization of Cloud Computing Applications through Cloud Data Mining and Analytics

Cloud Computing allows consumers to reduce the costs associated with the purchase

and maintenance of computing infrastructure, platform and software resources by

exploiting on-demand resource provisioning and pay-per-use payment models.

Although, cloud computing has offered significant benefits to the IT industry, the

research on cloud computing is currently at its infancy, with many issues still to be

addressed. In this project, we will investigate current cloud computing services and

state-of-the-art Analytics and Data mining techniques to research and develop a data

mining engine for improving cost efficiencies and optimizations in cloud resource

consumption. A full analysis will be conducted on applying analytics and data mining

techniques on cloud computing platform and infrastructure in enterprise IT and the

impact of business units within the organization. Recommendations for flagging high

cloud data transfer charges, unused cloud resources, operational efficiencies, and

areas of automation are encapsulated into a final report.

Nanostructured cathode material for high performance all-solid-state sodium battery

Lithium batteries are almost universally integrated in modern electronics applications due to their high efficiency and scalability. However, the liquid lithium-ion electrolyte utilized in these batteries has a multitude of safety concerns including flammability, toxicity, and the ability to explode if short-circuited. These issues lead to problems while operating in hazardous environments, more stringent transportation regulations, and pose a threat to the personal safety of consumers. Geometric Energy Corporation is working in conjunction with the Thangadurai Group to address these problems by developing an all-solid-state sodium-ion battery system. This system will be non-flammable, non-explosive, and non-toxic, eliminating these issues that are present in liquid-lithium batteries. Our battery technology will be applicable anywhere a liquid-lithium-ion battery is currently used, including the electric vehicle sector, personal electronics, and grid-scale applications. TO BE CONT’D

Building and supporting healthy educational communities: From kindergarten through university

Health and education have been shown to be interconnected and co-dependent. This research project will connect the work being done on Comprehensive School Health in the K-12 setting with similar work beginning in the post-secondary setting. Ever Active Schools has collaborated with school health teams for over 10 years (Healthy Active School Symposia – HASS). The data they have gathered from students, teachers and administrators will be an invaluable asset to the developmental process of embedding comprehensive school health in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta. This project will begin with analysis of the HASS data, then move to apply the results to both the K-12 and post-secondary settings. TO BE CONT’D

Caractérisation des poudres alimentaires lors de l’ensachage industriel en vue d’une prédiction des cadences optimales des équipements

Ce projet de maîtrise en ingénierie mécanique a pour but de prédire les paramètres optimaux nécessaires à mettre une poudre alimentaire dans un sac de transport via une machine industrielle. Cette étude passe donc par une recherche approfondie dans la mesure des paramètres comportementaux d’une poudre c’est-à-dire sa manière de s’écouler, de se compacter, etc. Grâce à des mesures pertinentes, il sera alors possible de créer une base de données intelligente qui donnera, pour une poudre inconnue, les débits optimaux que l’on peut obtenir lors de la mise en sacs, en fonction des paramètres mesurés sur la poudre inconnue. Cet outil va permettre au partenaire de réduire considérablement son temps d’étude d’une nouvelle poudre à ensacher et lui fera donc gagner en efficacité et en rapidité tant au sein de son équipe qu’auprès de ses clients.

Aboveground Storage Tank(AST) testing using statistical approach

Based on the original Statistical Inventory Reconciliation(SIR) Test Method (Quantitative), K-folds cross validation is used to increase P(D) and decrease P(FA) by adjusting K, which are related to bias and standard deviation. There is a trade-off between bias and variance, with very flexible models (overfit) having low bias and high variance, and relatively rigid models(underfit) having high bias and low variance. When K is larger, we have lower bias and larger standard deviation. Also, K-folds cross validation is very useful, when data size is small. So this methods has a higher validity with a lower data requirement.