Biobased products, mostly derived from plant biomass, have the potential to improve the sustainability of Canada’s natural resources and environmental quality while competing economically. Plant biomass, composed primarily of cell walls and modification of cell wall properties has the potential to improve biomass conversion to biobased products such as biofuels. Progress towards achieving this goal is currently impeded by a lack of knowledge of how cell walls are assembled and how their structure affects the processing of biomass.

Temperature control is very important to a modern day society. Certain beverages, such as soda pop, alcoholic beverages, and even water are refrigerated so that they are more refreshing to drink. This project objective is to design novel environmentally benign and emission-free self-cooling beverage cans. Two different systems with different cooling approached are considered. The first system is built on chemical reaction that does not evolve any harm output that the user will be exposed to, and the other system uses the physical principle of cooling with expansion and absorption.

The research goal of this internship is to develop various configurations of the CANDU 6™ reactor core fuelled with thorium to achieve a conversion ratio of at least one, (i.e. the reactor produces as much fissile material as it consumes). These cores should have equivalent power outputs as the baseline reactor, but achieve higher average discharge burnup. The utilization of thorium allows the exploitation of a currently unused energy source and more efficient usage of uranium fuel.