Innovative Projects Realized

Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions Through Calcium Looping CO2 Capture

Global warming and climate change have been increasingly attracting the attention of researchers and the public in the past few decades. It is believed in the scientific community that climate change is a direct effect of the increase of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere. Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is a promising solution for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. One promising methodology for capturing CO2 is calcium looping (CaL). Lime (CaO) is a solid material that has the ability to capture CO2 to produce limestone (CaCO3) and a clean gas stream. The clean gas stream will then be released into the atmosphere with minimal environmental impact, and the limestone will be heated to high temperatures to produce pure CO2 and lime. Modeling the calcium looping process provides insight for industrialization of this process without the difficulties of experimental methods. Research will be conducted in an attempt to better understand calcium looping and overcome the challenges associated with this process.

Understanding the Rise of the Asian Multinational Corporations: Organizational Competence and Innovativeness in Business Culture

Asian multinational corporations (MNCs) have been a primary driver of the world region’s economic rise. Their emergence brings fresh air and new challenges to the global economic order. Key to their success is a distinct form of business culture and organizational strategy, which the existing scholarship has yet to address. This project aims to develop a theoretical model to understand and explain this critical infrastructural dimension of Asian MNCs. This understanding is crucial as the Canadian businesses continue to compete and collaborate with said firms at home and abroad. The project contributes to a wide range of ongoing initiatives of Canada-Asia engagement at the Cansbridge Fellowship Foundation. Through multi-site field research, we will add a new transnational, real-world perspective to the Cansbridge’s intellectual outlook. The project will also contribute raw data to the Cansbridge database on Asian MNCs’ organizational behavior and business cultures, which will be made available to the Canadian business community.

Real-time Modeling of Virtual Synchronous Generator Type VSC Converters for Power Supply to Offshore Platforms

The voltage source converter VSC mimicking the behavior of a synchronous machine provides many advantages for grid operation. This “virtual synchronous generator (VSG)” will be implemented as a real-time simulator model on the RTDS simulator and used to investigate several operating scenarios.
The VS G behaves like a synchronous machine, which is one of the most widely used components of the legacy power system, and so it is well understood. The VSG can provide inertia and damping to the network. Particularly when the ac system is weak, frequency oscillations can be minimized with this approach. Also the VSG is versatile- it can function in the grid-connected mode and also islanding mode without a controller structure change. The VSG can also achieve power sharing between different VSC without communication link.
Several operating scenarios will be simulated. First, one single VSC is connect to the grid. And then the simulated system will expand to two or more VSCs to investigate their parallel operation. Both normal steady state operation and abnormal fault conditions will be tested. Besides, the VSC with VSG controller will be investigated as a synchronous compensator to provide reactive power support to the LCC-HVDC station…

Development of New Chromophores for Soil Detection on Surgical Instruments (part 2)

Small surgical instruments can be used multiple times if cleaned properly after each surgery. At the end of the cleaning process, a visual inspection of each instrument is performed in order to detect any traces of soil such as blood, tissue or any other biological materials. However, the human eye is not a flawless sensor and soils that are not visible to the naked can be present. The objective of this project is to develop new chromophores that could bind selectively to biological materials and emit light in a specific region of the electromagnetic spectrum, allowing quantitative analysis of the soil in an ambient environment without the need for complex setups that are difficult to operate. This technology will give STERIS a significant edge over the competition as no other reliable method for quantitative analysis has been commercialized yet. The results obtained in the first phase of this project are highly encouranging, but improvement still need to be done to make these molecules even more water-sluble to ensure an organic solvent-free process.

Enhancements/Tools for an Intelligent Voice-Centric Application

For educational voice?centric applications on computer and electronic devices, the proposed project

aims to investigate methodologies and tools to support collaborative production environments. The

company is developing proprietary collaborative production methods to support high quality ondemand

content for mobile applications at a fraction of the cost of traditional models. A key research

question for this voice? and language?centric application is: what methods and tools should be used

to streamline the animation production process for animators collaborating on 2D animations using

shared characters and resources? The main area of investigation is build an integrated tool for lipsyncing

in a 2D character environment – something that currently does not exist to the level of

sophistication as being proposed. The research project will also investigate the development of a

speech engine specialized for educational mobile applications and specific collaborative production

environment. This applied research is strategic and beneficial to the partner organizataion for being

cost effective while increasing creativity and quality.

Automatic Verification of Comparators and Hash Functions

The implementation of data structures usually requires checking for certain mathematical properties such as equality. Those properties are usually implemented in methods that reason about the objects stored in these data structures. However, the implementation of such methods is fairly complex, and may exhibit software bugs that may not necessarily lead to program crashes. Therefore, it is often hard to reproduce such bugs. This project aims at developing an automatic method that verifies the correctness of the implementation of such methods, without the need to reproduce the bugs that may result from incorrect implementations. Our focus will be comparators and hash functions as prime examples of such methods that check for mathematical properties.

Étude de l’effet des caractéristiques situationnelles, de la motivation et du choix des prédicteurs sur la prédiction de l’efficacité au travail

Les avancées technologiques et scientifiques ont mis de nouvelles méthodes et théories à la disposition des spécialistes de la sélection du personnel et de la prédiction des comportements au travail. Cependant, plusieurs de ces méthodes et modèles théoriques n’ont jamais été vérifiés empiriquement dans le cadre d’activités réelles de sélection du personnel. Ce projet vise à pallier partiellement ce manque en étudiant la validité prédictive de divers prédicteurs (personnalité, médias sociaux, capital psychologique) lorsque qu’un modèle récent de prédiction du comportement est appliqué. Pour ce faire, 400 travailleurs âgés de 18 ans et plus complèteront une batterie de test en contexte de sélection. Après au moins 6 mois en poste, les superviseurs des participants évalueront leurs comportements au travail à l’aide d’échelles psychométriques. Ce projet de recherche permettra à la firme partenaire de bonifier ses pratiques de sélection du personnel et d’offrir des processus à l’avant-garde des connaissances scientifiques et des outils technologiques.

Colonoscopy Video Analysis Framework

Every year in Canada over 1.7 million patients are diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis (UC), and have to go through colonoscopy procedures multiple times for disease detection and treatment monitoring. Trained clinicians use endoscopy facilities and technologies for colonoscopy procedures and unfortunately, the current error rate in disease detection is up to 20%. This project will build a framework that will analyze colonoscopy video streams in real-time, and offers the outcomes to support clinicians to accurately detect UC and monitor patient’s response to treatments.

Development of see-through near-eye display using embedded concave micromirror array for augmented reality applications

Near-eye displays (NEDs) are small displays that are positioned closed to the eye, which conveniently places visual information in the line of sight of a user. NEDs need to be compact and lightweight as they are typically worn on the head, taking the form of glasses or goggles. In this research, we design and build a thin and transparent NED. The proposed NED uses a high fill-factor embedded concave micromirror array (ECMMA), and light field principles for virtual image formation. We optimize our NED design using optical simulation software Zemax Opticstudio, and build a prototype using a transparent microdisplay and a custom-fabricated ECMMA.

Modeling structural damage in Arctic tanker accidents

The overall aim of the research is to develop a decision support system to quickly estimate the oil outflow from a damaged tanker in a collision or grounding accident, in Arctic conditions. The work in this project focuses on modeling the accidental damage size for representative tankers operating in the Canadian Arctic, when these experience a collision or grounding. Structural peculiarities of Arctic tankers are considered, as well as cold climate effects e.g. on the materials in the ship structure. First, a detailed Finite Element model is set up and runs are made for a range of impact scenarios, and resulting damage sizes obtained. Then, a simplified model is developed based on those model results, which can run faster. Ultimately, this model will be linked to an oil outflow model, and integrated in a decision support system for oil pollution preparedness and response authorities.

Modeling accidental oil outflows from shipping accidents

The overall aim of the research is to develop a decision support system to quickly estimate the oil outflow from a damaged tanker in a collision or grounding accident, in Arctic conditions. The work in this Mitacs project focuses on a part of this overall objective: modeling the dynamic oil outflow from a damaged tanker. Representative tankers operating in the Canadian Arctic, damaged in a collision or grounding accident, are in focus. The effect of wave conditions and cold climate effects on the viscosity of the oil are considered. First, a detailed Computational Fluid Dynamics model is set up and runs are made for a range of impact scenarios, which can account for external wave dynamics and a range of oil viscosities. This results in a number of time sequences of the volume of oil flowing out from a damaged tanker. Then, a simplified model is developed based on those model results, which can run fast. Ultimately, this model will be linked to a structural damage model for collision and grounding accidents in Arctic conditions, and integrated in a decision support system for oil pollution preparedness and response authorities.

A Clinical Proteomic Test for Patient Care

There are 2.6 million Canadians with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). COPD is a disease characterized by progressive loss of lung function that leads to shortness of breath, poor quality of life, reduced productivity, emergency visits, hospitalizations and mortality. The World Health Organization estimates that COPD will be the 3rd leading cause of death worldwide by 2030, accounting for more than 7 million deaths/year and 11,000 deaths/year in Canada. COPD patients frequently experience ‘lung attacks’, during which breathlessness, coughing, and sputum production dramatically increase, leading to urgent clinic visits, emergency admissions and hospitalizations. Lung attacks cost the Canadian health care system nearly $3 billion each year in direct expenditures. There are no blood tests to confirm a lung attack and because of this sometimes the doctors can make the wrong diagnosis, which leads to wrong therapies. In this project, we will develop a blood test to help doctors make the right diagnosis of lung attacks.