Innovative Projects Realized

Production de bioproduits commerciaux dans un réacteur biologique aérobique d’uneindustrie papetière

L’usine Kruger de Trois-Rivières dispose d’un système de traitement biologique des effluents

imposant pouvant traiter plus de 70000 mètres cubes d’eau usée par jour. Suite à la récente

fermeture de 5 machines à papiers et de deux coucheuses, le système de traitement

biologique des eaux usées par boues activées (aussi nommé un réacteur biologique

industriel) n’est plus opéré à pleine capacité. Afin de maintenir les emplois à l’usine, il y aurait

lieu de trouver une nouvelle utilisation aux équipements comme le système de traitement

biologique. Le traitement des eaux usées municipales de la Ville de Trois-Rivières est

proposé. Il serait ensuite opportun d’utiliser le système de traitement biologique pour produire

à grande échelle des microorganismes industriels et leurs produits d’intérêt commercial.

Également, les boues industrielles et municipales générées par un tel système pourraient

être utilisées comme milieux de culture alternatifs et bon marché pour des microorganismes

industriels dont les produits microbiens sont utilisables sur place ou localement…

Insecurity of tenure as a lesser known health and wellbeing crisis: Health and wellbeing perspectives of young families and children living without security of tenure

Major cities in Canada and across the world are undergoing housing crises that are pushing its vulnerable residents into housing insecurity. Security of tenure is a lesser-known and researched element that contributes to housing insecurity and its negative health and wellbeing impacts. To ensure the positive health and wellbeing outcomes of cities’ families and their children, developers and housing policy-makers should understand how insecurity of tenure, a critical challenge in housing insecurity, can affect the health and wellbeing perspectives of families and their children. This research will provide unique insight into the experiences of young families with children as they navigate housing insecurity, and the lesser known housing barrier of insecurity of tenure.

Cognitive Control of Auditory Environment (CCAE)

The CCAE project aims to create a hearing assistance device that is steered by brain activity. We will monitor brain signals that reflect the user’s attentional focus by the use of non-invasive brain recording called electroencephalography (EEG). These recordings will be used to help the hearing assistance device to separate, identify, and enhance sounds of interest to the user in a noisy environment. The project combines neuroscience, advanced acoustics, and artificial intelligence to produce a device that can benefit the growing population of people with hearing impairment, advance the state-of-the-art in each of these fields, and provide cutting-edge research value to the partner organization.

Desorption and sorption isotherms of hemp seeds with dockage

Very few guidelines (such as the isotherm equations – the moisture content of hemp seeds at a given temperature, and relative humidify) exist on aeration, natural air drying, and storage of hemp seeds. If producers and managers used wrong isotherms, spoilage or over drying of the binned hemp seeds might occur during storage. The objectives of this study were to establish the desorption and sorption isotherms of hemp seeds of two common varieties with different percentages of dockage (0, 5, 10, and 15%) by using two most-used methods: static and dynamic methods, and determine the difference of the desorption and absorption isotherms among different hemp varieties. After using the developed isotherms by the producers and managers, the quality of the processed hemp seeds can be improved, so the Canada consumers of the hemp industries can be benefitted from the high quality hemp seeds.

Implication of the nucleotide pool sanitizing enzyme NUDT1 in vascular remodeling in pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH)

Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is a progressive condition characterized by the chronic elevation of pulmonary artery (PA) pressure leading to failure of the heart. In spite of recent advances in approved therapies, PAH remains a serious disease with significant mortality. In contrast to the earlier belief that contraction of pulmonary vessels played a key role in PAH, it is now established that excessive proliferation of the cells within the pulmonary artery wall is a pivotal component of pulmonary vascular obliteration, a currently irreversible feature of PAH for which available pharmacotherapies have no/limited efficacy. In recent years, it has become increasingly appreciated that damage to cells’ DNA (where our genes are encrypted) largely contributes to this phenomenon in PAH by influencing numerous functions of the cells.
This proposal addresses a very novel and promising therapeutic avenue to treat PAH by studying the role of NUDT1 in the progressive vascular remodeling seen in PAH.

AI based acoustic signal processing and analysis and its applications

Artificial intelligence (AI) provides powerful tools to many acoustic related applications. This proposal aims at acoustic signal processing and analysis and its applications using AI technologies. In order for AI to make progress in understanding the acoustic world around us, it needs to be interpreted along with multimodal messages. Three subprojects, i.e., multi-modal acoustic scene recognition, audio-visual speech recognition and audio signal processing for healthcare purpose using deep learning techniques are included in this proposal. The project is expected to enhance the AI capabilities of the partner organization for its 5G applications in acoustic related application scenarios.

Effect of Shape Parameterization and Optimization Algorithms on Adjoint Based Aerodynamic Shape Optimization

A very important phase in aircraft design is the aerodynamic design of the wing and

various other components: wing-body fairing, tailplane, etc. With today’s computer

power and progress in algorithm development, the design is made through complex

mathematical models which are amenable to automatic optimization. An industrial

adjoint-based three-dimensional viscous optimization framework, developed at

Bombardier Aerospace, will be made more efficient by performing code-to-code

validation with research codes at UTIAS. Improvements in all area of the framework

will be examined, ie. aerodynamic parameterization, mesh movement and optimization

algorithms. The importance of overall robustness of the framework will be

demonstrated on test cases. The benefits will be to increase the t

Therapeutic Strategies for Restoring Palmitoylation and Autophagy in Neurodegeneration

The cellular clearance pathway autophagy is required for degrading toxic proteins and damaged organelles, but is disrupted in many neurodegenerative diseases. During induction many autophagy regulators quickly localise to membranes from the cytosol. The Martin lab has identified palmitoylation, which involves the addition of the fatty acid palmitate to cysteine residues, as a potential regulator to direct autophagy proteins to membranes. The Martin lab has confirmed that several regulators of autophagy are palmitoylated, including the key autophagy receptor p62 that tags and delivers toxic substrates to lysosomes for degradation. p62 palmitoylation was significantly decreased in brains of Huntington disease (HD) patients and an HD mouse model suggesting that decreased p62 palmitoylation may lead to the impaired cargo loading seen in HD cells. Therefore, rescuing p62 palmitoylation may represent a therapeutic target for HD.

Mechanical design of prototype down hole products, test rigs and manufacturing equipment for oil and gas sector – part 2

Down hole tools in the oil and gas (O&G) industry has long been used to increase the oil recovery and limit unwanted products like water, sand and steam. RGL is a world leader on both Sand control and Flow control products, with a focus on technology driven solutions. Various sand screens, slotted liner designs, flow control devices and shifting tools are in development in the engineering and research group. A critical understanding of the science behind the measured phenomena is pursued with fundamental research in partnership with the UofA. Applied research is conducted in house through the proLAB team, and once the research is taking shape in the form of a product, the Engineering services team engage to design and develop the product, the manufacturing methods and equipment and the process documentation.
The aim of this project is to engage students, skilled with drafting and design capabilities, to grab hold of a specific product or research area and develop the opportunity into a commercialized product, or improve the equipment and process through design changes, under the supervision of the lead Mechanical Engineer.

Protection Coordination Planning with Distributed Generation (DG) and the Impactof DG on Safety, Equipment and Distribution System Operation

Driven by economic, technical and environmental reasons, the energy sector is moving into an era where

Distributed Generation (DG) will meet a large segment of increasing electrical energy demand. Local

distribution companies (LDCs) are required to accept a given percentage of customer-owned renewable DG

units in their system. Generally, DG introduces new possibilities such as shaving of peak loads and

reliability enhancement. On the other hand, DG causes a number of protection problems in the distribution

networks, such as loss of coordination, de-sensitization, nuisance fuse blowing, relay bidirectional

operation, and overvoltages. In this work, all protection problems caused by DGs will be studied. The DG

penetration level that ignites each problem will be investigated. Solutions will be suggested to avoid the

adverse effects of the DGs based on simulation results and a prototype will be built to realize the suggested

solutions.

Tensor based machine learning with human computer interaction applications

In this research, first we will using tensor network techniques speedup the processing in neural network since computational cost is a major bottleneck in neural network based deep learning. Note that the weight matrix in each layer of neural network is with huge size, because of millions of parameters. This may cause large time complexity to calculate all the parameters. To overcome the large time complexity, we could use tensor decomposition to calculate the low-rank weight matrix, to reduce a large amount of parameters, therefore to reduce the time complexity. The tensor networks include Hierarchical Tucker (HT), Tensor Train (TT), CP, and Tucker decomposition etc. Second, we propose to develop tensor based algorithms to solve spatiotemporal corrupted problem, complex background problem in human action recognition (HAR) and denoising problems in medical images. The human action videos are represented as a high-dimensional tensor, and we can solve the spatiotemporal corrupted problem by tensor completion, and recurrent neural network to deal with the missing frames problem; also we could denoise the high-dimensional medical images by tensor completion.

Assessment of indoor environmental quality in the school building

Indoor environmental quality in schools is one of the major issues that should be considered. Indoor air quality (freshness and cleanness of air inside the building) and thermal comfort (the comfortable condition when no one is feeling either too hot or too cold) in schools can have significant impact on children’s health, learning and productivity. The purpose of this research is to evaluate indoor environmental quality (indoor air quality, thermal comfort, lighting, and acoustics) in First Nation School. To achieve this goal we conduct long-term measurements of indoor air quality and thermal comfort parameters (CO2, temperature, and relative humidity) and ask the teachers to participate in voluntary and anonymous questionnaire survey about their perception of parameters of indoor environmental quality. The data will be shared with the partner organization to develop different retrofit packages to improve indoor environment quality and energy efficiency of the school building depending on potential to achieve goals such as energy savings, CO2 reduction, cost savings, improvement in thermal comfort by using Building Information Modeling optimization tool.