Lift stations are an underground utility transporting wastewater from residential or commercial sources to wastewater treatment plants. Lift stations are defined as a post-disaster structure according to national building code of Canada, which are required to remain operational immediately after earthquakes. A wealth of evidence from historical post-earthquake reconnaissance has confirmed the excellent performance of […]

Materials circularity is becoming increasingly important for designers and manufacturers across the world, driven by a variety of factors including increased restrictions to landfill dumping through the legacy “make-take-dispose” model, through to social campaigns. The aim of this collaborative project is to perform a feasibility study on replacing current airport luggage handling infrastructure at Vancouver […]

Missing Middle Housing (MMH) encompasses several moderate density housing types which offer similar features to a single detached home, while reducing costs to the buyer, reducing the environmental footprint and reducing the amount of land used. Although many Municipalities on Vancouver Island are beginning to encourage MMH, there are still relatively few of these homes […]

This research study focuses on the communication and transmission of technical and industrial analytic data, developed by our research partner, ioAirFlow. Because the current recipients of ioAirFlow data reports are not always data- or engineering-trained professionals, complex data is not often understood or acted upon. This research internship focuses on ways in which to develop […]

NORAM Engineering and Constructors Ltd. (NORAM) has developed a bench-scale process capable of producing low strength fibres from Alberta oil sands asphaltenes (AOA). The objective of the proposed collaborative research between NORAM and UBC is to broaden the application space of AOA by improving the structural and functional properties of AOA-CF through polymer blend and […]

The Canadian agricultural sector is facing a wide range of challenges that include depleting natural resources (e.g., water), environmental pollution (e.g., fertilizers), and climate change. Precision agriculture is a method of farming that uses technologies to monitor soil and crop status and support timely and variable-rate farming practices. It is thus a promising approach to […]

A previous feasibility study performed at UBC on the Mount Polly samples showed that dense media separation gave copper recoveries of 95.8% at a specific gravity of 2.9. The purpose of this research project is to confirm the applicability of dense media separation for Mount Polley ore pre-concentration. A lab test will be performed as […]

Climate change will cause increasing temperature fluctuations and longer heat waves. This will make home cooling essential, but adding and using cooling can be too expensive for low-income homeowners, including seniors. Incentive programs exist to help people make energy-efficient retrofits to their homes, but they can increase housing costs. This does not work for many […]

Global warming is a major issue faced by society nowadays and to fight it we need to be able to make global climate projections with less uncertainty. Despite numerous progresses in theoretical and computational modelling, there are still climatic phenomena that remain partially unresolved because of the coarseness of the grid resolutions used in global […]

There is a need for customers to use a simple test method to determine if the fuel blends they are using are of the proper composition for fuel efficiency, environment- friendliness and engine cylinder compatibility. But it is difficult to determine the composition of oil/fuel/ethanol mixtures without detailed and expensive chemical analysis. It is because […]

This project’s objective is to help improve knowledge regarding consumer perspectives of conventional car mobility and transport innovations in Canada, with particular focus on fully automated vehicles (FAVs), or vehicles that can drive themselves without requiring a driver to be paying attention. Innovations can alter the transport sector’s environmental sustainability – for example, electric vehicles […]

Compass Minerals’ Goderich salt mine is the largest underground salt mine in the world. The mine is located 1,800 feet under Lake Huron, Ontario, producing rock salt for winter deicing and for making plastics, detergents, disinfectants and other important products. Fresh water is withdrawn from the municipal water supplies and used for the surface and […]