Innovative Projects Realized

Explore thousands of successful projects resulting from collaboration between organizations and post-secondary talent.

30508 Completed Projects

2882
AB
5105
BC
825
MB
681
NL
860
SK
9051
ON
9491
QC
97
PE
586
NB
1141
NS

Projects by Category

Evaluation of value-added lignin-based bioproducts for commercial applications

During the production of pulp, in the pulp and paper manufacturing process, one component of the tree is extracted into the pulping liquid. This component, called lignin, has potential value as an important renewable material for adhesives, fibre, and coatings. The proposed research has the focus on evaluating the pulping liquid for all of its components and transforming the lignin material into prototype materials for forest industries in British Columbia. Namely, lignin will be converted into 1) nonwoven fibre for the production of filtration media, suitable for personal protection equipment, and 2) a key ingredient in polyurethane foams, a key material in rigid building insulation foams. Key to the proposed materials is developing proper formulations for the insulation foams with the industrial lignins along with moving the lab scale spinning to the next production scale to derisk the technology. We hope to substitute fossil based chemicals using these renewable materials in potential new markets.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Scott Renneckar;Shawn Mansfield

Student:

Partner:

Harmac Pacific (Nanaimo Forest Products);West Fraser Mills Ltd. (Quesnel);FPInnovations (Vancouver, BC)

Discipline:

Physics

Sector:

Forestry; Clean Technology; Sustainability & the Environment

University:

The University of British Columbia

Program:

Accelerate

CASI Platform, Environment pillar: Benchmarking the environmental and climate performance of Canadian Agriculture

By 2050, agri-food systems must produce enough to feed 9 to billion people, while reversing trends of environmental degradation caused in part by agriculture production. This is no small task, and underscores why countless sustainable agriculture standards, certifications, initiatives and platforms have emerged to encourage and measure the impacts of sustainable agriculture practices. While these approaches to encourage, measure and verify sustainability have merit, they can also cause confusion and overwhelm producers and actors along agri-food value chains as they decide what approach best aligns with their sustainability goals and can be integrated within their operation. The Canadian Agri-food Sustainability Initiative (CASI), a one-stop online sustainability platform, aims to mitigate this confusion and duplication, and ensure Canadian producers can effectively record and communicate their performance on sustainability benchmarks. This Accelerate Mitacs Internship will contribute to the development of CASI by conducting an environmental scan that will inform the development of the environmental sustainability pillar, facilitate engagement with key stakeholders, and contributing to the dissemination on the progress of the CASI platform.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Ben Bradshaw

Student:

Partner:

Wilton Consulting Group

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Guelph

Program:

Accelerate

A techno-economic framework to determine the potential of photovoltaic integrated blinds for buildings

A new solar electricity system is being developed here by Solaires Entreprises Inc. founded in Victoria, BC. The novel fabrication method and materials reduces the cost of solar cells by up to 50%. The new price point of the cells allows us to make solar energy profitable in Canada as well as incorporate solar cells where previously this was not possible. One new product that is being developed is PVblindsTM, a type of venetian blinds that will generate electricity while blocking out the direct sunlight. During this project, we will investigate the profitability of the PVblindsTM by determining the direct sunlight for several buildings in the greater Vancouver region and comparing the system cost to energy savings using simulations. Furthermore, our project will determine how these new cells perform under real conditions through experiments. And lastly, we will compare the performance of this new system to existing solar energy technologies.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Ralph Evins

Student:

Partner:

Solaires

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Manufacturing; Professional, scientific and technical services; Utilities

University:

University of Victoria

Program:

Accelerate

Technologies for Living Independently: A Technology Case Study on Remote Patient Monitoring

The population age distribution is undergoing an “inversion” and the dependency ratio, i.e., the proportion of older adults who are not working over the number of adults who are working, is increasing. This has an effect on a society’s ability to deliver community-care services and the underlying national economic capacity to pay for their needs. Advances in ICT (information and communications technologies) promise to provide support for affordable systems of care that enable human resources to be used more effectively. The use of these technologies to support community-based care is complex and demands an approach fundamentally different from ICT in acute care. In acute care settings, highly trained clinical professionals deliver care in special-purpose clinical settings, and manage the related information in Electronic Health Records.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Martin Ferguson-Pell;Eleni Stroulia;Lili Liu

Student:

Partner:

TELUS Health Space

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Alberta

Program:

Accelerate

Economic and technical feasibility assessment of decarbonizing British Columbia’s building, transport and industrial sectors with electrification and power-to-gas transitions

This project investigates substitution of fossil fuels with electricity from renewable sources for the purpose of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in British Columbia. Burning natural gas, gasoline, diesel and other petroleum products heats our buildings, drives out cars, and powers our industries. Electricity generated from hydro, wind, and solar power can provide those same services, but producing sufficient electricity from variable sources at the right time remains challenging. Converting electricity to gases like hydrogen or methane can be cost-effective to store electricity and deliver energy using gas infrastructure. This project will use mathematical modelling to determine costs, locations, operation and types of power plants, transmission lines, and gas production facilities needed to achieve significant greenhouse gas emission reductions by the year 2050.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Andrew Rowe;Peter Wild

Student:

Partner:

FortisBC Energy Inc

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Utilities

University:

University of Victoria

Program:

Accelerate

Catalysing Network Change: Exploring Practical Tools to Spark Food Network Action

Food systems organizations work brings together planners, community organizers, public health professionals, food producers, distributors and other food champions to transform food systems through direct action in communities, and collective action across organizations and regions. Many regions across Ontario have identified a fundamental challenge: moving from collaboration to action within their region. This includes the challenges of engaging policy-makers; finding ways to identify and include relevant, absent voices; creating a space where uncomfortable conversations can lead to constructive engagement; and agreeing on a specific area of focus in a food system rife with issues, among organizations whose mandates target not only food but health, climate change, poverty and social justice, among others. This project will help to provide pathways to action by collecting and assessing the merits of different approaches used with success in other regions to move from strategy to action.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Charles Levkoe

Student:

Partner:

Sustain Ontario

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Other services (except public administration)

University:

Lakehead University

Program:

Accelerate

COVID-19, Women’s Mental Health and Therapeutic Recreation in Yukon Territory.

The impact of COVID-19 on the mental health of women is currently unknown in Yukon Territory. Women have experienced unemployment, domestic violence and greater caregiving responsibilities because of COVID-19. It is important to support women’s mental health during the pandemic. Therapeutic Recreation is a healthcare profession that uses leisure and recreation to improve health and wellbeing. Therapeutic Recreation provides positive leisure experiences that can reduce the impacts of C19 on women’s mental health. This project aims to support women’s mental health during COVID-19 in Yukon Territory. Women ages 18+ and Recreation Therapists will take part in interviews talking about their mental health. We will share the results with the Canadian Mental Health Association, Yukon Government, academic audiences and educational institutions to help women during COVID-19.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Tara-Leigh McHugh

Student:

Partner:

Canadian Mental Health Association (Yukon)

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Health and Related Sciences & Technology; Public Service, Policy, and Governance; COVID-19 related Research and Solutions

University:

University of Alberta

Program:

Accelerate

Integration of Hybrid Distributed Resources in Three Different Systems With and Without Global Adjustment

The use of hybrid distributed energy resources (HDERs) has grown rapidly during the last decade as a way to reduce the stress placed on the utility grid by society’s ever-expanding power consumption. They consist of fossil fuel generators, battery energy storage systems, and renewable energy systems and can be designed to interact with the grid in various system architectures to supply end-user loads. It is important to size and integrate HDERs appropriately so that they can meet load demands, while still being cost-effective. The proposed project, which will be a collaboration between researchers from Western University and AVL Manufacturing in Hamilton ON, will be concerned with the design of new HDERs and will focus on three HDER architectures. These new HDERs will be commercialized by AVL and promise to make AVL an industry leader in HDER system technology.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Gerry Moschopoulos

Student:

Partner:

AVL Manufacturing Inc

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Manufacturing

University:

The University of Western Ontario

Program:

Accelerate

Environmentally friendly adhesion promoter compositions for multilayer coating applications

In the first year of the proposed project, we will explore and optimize the application of environmentally friendly solvents for organosilane adhesion promoters that are used in the production of HSS by Canusa-CPS. In the second year, the shelf-life and lifetime of such products will be investigated using accelerated testing procedures. The results of the proposed research project will be beneficial to Canusa-CPS for the development of environmentally friendly adhesion promoters and lay the groundwork for new testing methods that predict the lifetime of HSS products. The proposed research will also create unique opportunities for the training of highly qualified personnel by exposing them to real-world technical and industrial challenges.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Hamed Shahsavan

Student:

Partner:

SFL Canusa Canada Ltd.

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Manufacturing

University:

University of Waterloo

Program:

Accelerate

Consuming Social Media Services on Heterogeneous Devices

Social media integration into enterprise-oriented workflows is gaining widespread adoption due to factors such as crowdsourcing and inter-organization collaborations. The partner organization has an existing system that is working for helping Saskatchewan businesses grow by bringing educated youth into the province. Their system is for providing opportunities for people all around the world to live and work in Saskatchewan. Our work will be to re-develop the existing infrastructure in a way that it can be integrated with social media with user generated content. Further, the improved system will be cross-platform independent and can be deployed in a desktop and mobile environments. The partner organization IIBC will have the results generated by the research. This research could allow the partner organization to broaden out their offerings of products to different mobile devices and better satisfy their customer’s needs

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Faculty Supervisor:

Ralph Deters

Student:

Partner:

International Immigration and Business Consulting

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Saskatchewan

Program:

Accelerate

Co-Ordination of Steel Production Operationsfor Increased Throughput

This project aims to improve the throughput of the production system at ArcelorMittal through better coordination between the production operations. The project proposes a sophisticated discrete-event simulation model to analyze the impact of all important parameters of the production system, such as steel temperature, furnace heat duration, ladle movements, and heat loss at ladle. Several improved coordination strategies will be generated and deployed in the simUlation model and the to-be behavior of the system will be observed. For each high-performance coordination strategy, sensitivity analyses will be done to validate the robustness. The results will provide ArcelorMittal managers with a better understating of the production system and individual significance of all its parameters to its performance. The proposed coordination practices will lead to significant cost savings and throughput improvements. The results of this project will also be used as a numerical basis for future investments and improvements to the system.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Vince Thomson

Student:

Partner:

ArcelorMittal (Longueuil, QC)

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Manufacturing; Mining

University:

McGill University

Program:

Accelerate

Dynamic multi-type multi-priority emergency surgery scheduling with accurate service duration estimation

The process of setting surgical schedules in a modern hospital operating room suite is complicated. Scheduling surgery involves coordinating two separate but inter-related service distribution channels, namely, elective surgery operations and emergency surgery operations. Elective surgical cases are selected from a broad range of diagnostic categories and are scheduled in advance into surgical time that usually runs during regular business hours. In contrast, emergency surgery, often referred to as “unscheduled” surgery randomly emerges from a much narrower range of higher urgency indications and is scheduled by allocation onto available operating room time-based on relative priority. The emergency surgery waitlist is particularly challenging to manage as the operating room manager must simultaneously consider multiple patients from multiple priority levels and balance available resources against many uncertainties including demand variability and surgery duration. There is an agreement in medical society that a delay in receiving emergency surgery care can result in adverse patient outcomes. Therefore, based on the urgency of the case, operations are categorized into several priority groups so that each group has its own wait time target within which surgeries should be scheduled.

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Faculty Supervisor:

Hossein Abouee Mehrizi

Student:

Partner:

On Time OR Scheduling

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Health and Related Sciences & Technology

University:

University of Waterloo

Program:

Accelerate

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