Innovative Projects Realized

Innovating Corrosion Measurement for Your Vehicle

From 2014-2018, Krown Corporation, a pioneer in corrosion treatment, partnered with University of Windsor Faculty of Engineering researchers to conduct a comprehensive assessment on how to measure and assess the degree of corrosion on a vehicle, so that it may be communicated to the vehicle owner. This preliminary research demonstrated that a corrosion metric, and the method developed to measure corrosion, show excellent promise to assess and communicate the impacts of corrosion and further research is critical to refining the metric so that it can be applied intelligently on a broad scale yet be usable and understandable to both users of the metric and consumers of vehicles. Hence, the proposed research will include refining the results by expanding significantly the data set, and then developing an intelligent means of interpreting the corrosion present to produce high quality, consistent assessments of the state of vehicle corrosion.

New Approaches to Mine Closure in Nunavik, Québec

Mine closure is the final stage of a mine’s lifecycle and can have complex social, economic, and cultural impacts on nearby communities. These impacts include population decline, reduced services, household stress, ecological change, and reduced access to land-based activities. These impacts become more likely when communities are not engaged with during the closure planning process. Glencore Raglan is attempting to mitigate these issues through the Raglan Mine Closure Sub-committee, which is made up of both company employees and community representatives from Salluit and Kangiqsujuaq. Their goal is to collaboratively develop a closure plan that meets community needs. Through the Mitacs Accelerate program, students from Memorial University of Newfoundland are working with this sub-committee to aid its progress by: (a) tracking and evaluating its work, and (b) conducting comparative analyses of mine closure plans and mine remediation sites from across Northern Canada to inform the development of Raglan’s closure plan. This project will contribute to knowledge about best practices for community engaged mine closure planning and will ensure that the next iteration of Raglan’s closure plan more effectively meets community needs and centres Inuit voices.

Non-Viral Approach to Immunotherapy with Engineered Polymers

A new therapy was developed in order to combat cancers by stimulating our immune system to fight agents the cancer cells in the body. The activated immune system is more efficient to fight the cancer cells than the common drugs, but stimulating the immune system is very expensive and labour-intensive with the currently developed protocols. This project will develop a cost-effective way to stimulate immune system to fight cancers. We will use advanced biomaterials and immune stimulatory genes in order to achieve this. Our proposal is mush less labour intensive then the current protocols to stimulate immune system. Successful completion of the project will reduce the burden of immune-therapy on healthcare system and make the treatment available to a large population of patients.

Morphological investigation of adhesive blends and its effect on multilayer coating performance

In the pipeline industry, the heat shrink sleeves (HSS) are the protective layer usually composed of two layers, namely, an adhesive layer and a crosslinked backing layer such as polypropylene (PP) or polyethylene (PE). In order to maintain the desired properties of HSS, each of the layers must maintain their properties during processing, storage, and installation. In partnership with Canusa-CPS, the proposed research aims at addressing the relationships between the morphological structure and interfacial strength of the adhesive layers with their performance. Combining the characterization, rheological and mechanical analysis, the proposed study will correlate the mechanical performance of the adhesives to their material, design and morphological parameters. The research will be beneficial to our partner in developing a new generation of adhesives.

Rôle de la voie de signalisation Notch lors de la réponse des lymphocytes T CD8

Dans le domaine de la santé, l’étude de l’immunologie et des maladies infectieuses est un sujet de recherche important, car certaines maladies, tel que le VIH et le cancer, restent incurables à ce jour. Nos recherches s’intéressent à la réponse immunitaire adaptative et plus particulièrement aux lymphocytes T CD8, un type de globule blanc. Dans le cas particulier des infections chroniques et des cancers, il y a une persistance de la maladie à long terme provoquer entre autres par la présence continue de l’inflammation et de l’antigène ce qui mène progressivement à un état d’épuisement des lymphocytes T CD8 et un mauvais contrôle de ces maladies. Mon but est d’étudier les événements moléculaires impliqués dans la mise en place de l’épuisement des lymphocytes T CD8 dans un contexte d’infection chronique, afin de développer de nouvelles stratégies thérapeutiques pour combattre les infections chroniques et le cancer. Notre laboratoire s’intéresse particulièrement au rôle de la voie de signalisation Notch lors de la réponse des lymphocytes T CD8. Des résultats préliminaires suggèrent que la voie Notch joue un rôle important dans la prévention de l’épuisement des lymphocytes T CD8.

Metal Nitride Complexes with Non-innocent Carbene-phenolate Ligands for Hydrocarbon Amination

Organic feedstock chemicals such as those from extracted from natural gas and petroleum refinement are employed as fuels, however their abundance and relative inexpensive makes them attractive candidates as starting materials for other useful chemicals. This remains a difficult yet highly desired task for chemists, as these compounds are notoriously unreactive. We plan to develop catalysts; metal-containing compounds designed to facilitate feedstock transformation for use as viable reagents. Our approach is to synthesize these catalysts based on the active sites of certain metalloenzymes capable of facilitating these reactions elegantly at mild conditions. The key lies in the careful design of the surrounding framework bonded to the metal centre- the ligand. In most cases, the ligand does not participate in the electronic modifications in the overall catalyst, however our ligands (and those exemplified by the enzymes) are designed to shuttle electrons to and from the metal centre, greatly enhancing catalytic activity. Through a variety of approaches, this this project will result in the creation of new materials for the effective conversion of organic feedstocks.

Infrared imager

This project will develop the enabling technologies for next generation infrared sensors. Although infrared imaging was

historically developed for military applications, the biggest opportunities for growth are in commercial markets. Infrared

imaging is recognized as an important green technology because of its numerous applications in environmental

monitoring, thermography, process control, and inspection and maintenance of industrial equipment. Commercial vision

applications include surveillance, automotive and maritime safety, and fire?fighting. The proposed project represents an

important opportunity for Canada to contribute to these areas or growing importance. The main technical hurdles

addressed in this project include the development wafer?level vacuum packaging of microbolometers, low?temperature

3D?integration with electronics, cost?efficient deposition of high quality temperature sensitive thin film structures, and

optical efficiency. This project is in collaboration with Teledyne DALSA, developers of advanced imaging and semiconductor

technologies, with the Université de Sherbrooke and the École Polytechnique de Montréal.

Automatic weld seam positioning on sheet metal enclosures by semi-supervised deep learning

Deep learning in computer vision has set new standards in mobile and web-based applications. The power of learning-based computer vision has also tremendous potential in machine vision. Traditionally, machine vision in manufacturing employs analytic solutions often resulting in excellent accuracy but poor robustness. The goal of this project is to increase robustness of a vision-based measurement process in sheet metal manufacturing using deep learning. The ability to accommodate variations in manufacturing enables a manufacturer to provide customized solutions in a more time efficient and cost effective way. One of the major challenges in machine vision is the lack of appropriate large-size training data for supervised learning. This project will train a deep learning algorithm based on all kind of data including expert-labelled images, existing results of a machine vision algorithm and unlabeled images. The project is to provide an effective solution for the industrial partner and general research results.

Développement de surfaces aluminium superhydrophobes antibactériennes par procédés plasma

Les surfaces sont exposées au dépôt de divers type de bactéries présents dans leur environnement favorisant par la suite la contamination de la surface. Ceci défini un problème majeur dans divers domaines comme par exemple la diminution des rendements dans les industries agro-alimentaires, pharmaceutiques ce qui a contribué à l’augmentation des coûts de production. Les infections associées aux soins de santé (IAS) aussi sont causées par une grande variété de bactéries, de champignons et de virus pendant les traitements médicaux dans les milieux de soins de santé. Le traitement des IAS est devenu plus difficile et couteux compte tenu de l’augmentation de la résistance antimicrobienne via à vis des antibiotiques. En effet, plus de 50 % des IAS sont causées par des bactéries résistantes à au moins un type d’antibiotique.

De nombreuses méthodes ont été inventées pour faire face aux problèmes de l’adhésion des micro-organismes. Cependant ces méthodes sont souvent limitées dans leur application vu l’utilisation des agents nocive pour l’environnement et l’inefficacité d’application sur les grandes surfaces.

Une solution intéressante qui pourrait empêcher l’adhésion des bactéries, est de développer des surfaces superhydrophobes (non-mouillables) dans lesquels les agents antibactériens seront incorporés.

Accelerated detection and classification for surveillance applications

Object detection and classification for surveillance applications via deep neural networks have attracted a lot of interests in computer vision (CV) communities. Accurate and fast CV algorithms can alleviate intensive manual labour and reduce human errors due to fatigue and distraction. In detection problem, the aim is to determine bounding boxes which contain interested objects and classify the category of the detected object. Thus, the detection problem can be formulated as a regression problem to localize multiple objects within a frame. Due to very limited computational budgets on the edge devices, server-side solutions like YOLO and R-CNN are not suitable for embedded devices or high-throughput applications that scale to thousands of cameras. It is challenging to achieve real-time object detection performance while maintaining high accuracy. In this research proposal, we focus on reducing computation latency by developing models with a smaller number of trainable parameters to accelerate object detection and classification. First, we take the advantage of the depth separable convolution layer which has less model complexity. Second, we consider hierarchical processing units to localize multiple objects in one-time forward pass of the neural network.

Transfert d’expertises liées à l’étude de l’embryogénèse et de la valvulogénèse chez la souris.

Avant de débuter mon doctorat sur des modèles animaux de valvulopathies au sein de l’institut du thorax de Nantes, je souhaite partir 12 semaines à l’institut de cardiologie de Montréal afin de développer des compétences en termes de dissection embryonnaire et de caractérisation des embryons par méthode de double hybride. En effet, j’aurai l’occasion lors de ma thèse de travailler sur un modèle de rat de prolapsus valvulaire mitral. La pathologie est congénitale, néanmoins la dissection des embryons et des coussins valvulaires ainsi que leur étude est bien délicate et non maitrisée au sein de l’insititut du thorax de Nantes. De plus, le protocole de double hybride afin d’investiguer les acteurs du développement de pathologies valvulaires n’est pas développée à Nantes. La mise au point de ces protocoles est un processus long et coûteux. L’équipe avec laquelle je souhaite collaborer à Montréal disposera des embryons afin de développer ces protocoles de début Janvier 2020 à Mars 2020. Il est donc primordial pour moi de partir à la recherche de ces expertises afin de les développer sur Nantes à mon retour.

Antimicrobial Coatings Development

Copper-based antimicrobial coatings could play a significant role in reducing infections in hospitals and care facilities, reducing spoilage in consumer appliances, and reducing fouling on the hulls of ships. In this project, the development of copper-based coatings will be pursued for a wide variety of surfaces using paints and other advanced coating technologies. The chemical and physical properties of the coatings will be characterized and improved to minimize costs while maintaining effective killing of bacteria and fungi. With this information, the project partner will be able to continue advancing towards commercialization of a coatings industry for achieving the various antimicrobial goals.