Innovative Projects Realized

Silver recovery from scrap materials: the security and longevity of raw scrap, and the development of a sustainable business model

Essential Silver Incorporated is a recycling business looking to expand it’s operations in North America. The company’s specialty is recycling silver and a specific type of plastic called PET from x-rays. In order to justify the additional investment in the business ESI needs to have a better understanding of the market and it’s operations. ESI require research in the following three areas:

1) Raw Materials – Research the ongoing supply of raw x-ray materials in North America

2) Research alternative uses for the recycling by-product PET.

3) Geo-expansion and Optimization Strategy – Research best practices to establish a Canadian and United States network to acquire, transport and process raw materials in multiple locations. Develop a strategy for ESI’s expansion based on these findings.

Identifying source population of European Starling (Sturnus vulgaris) through geochemical fingerprinting in Okanagan valley of British Columbia.

This work identifies the origin of source population of bird named European Starling (Sturnus vulgaris) which makeup the winter population of Okanagan-Similkameen valley. These pest birds are aggressive and destructive in nature. At once, thousands of them fly in a group and destroys fruits in orchard. In this project, I plan to collect bone samples of migrant winter birds of Okanagan-Similkameen valley and the juvenile birds from outside of the Okanagan and analyze trace elements (micronutrient). Trace elements are preserved in bone tissues, which represent the geographic regions. Since the geology of British Columbia is very diversified, geochemical fingerprinting technique would be best to identify the origin. The comparison between the early summer reference birds and the fall potentially migrant birds collect in and out of Okanagan- Similkameen valley will provide us a clear indication of the bird’s origin. Once we find the origin of the source population, Starling Control Program (SCP) in Okanagan can act further for an
effective management of these pest birds.

Prototyping for Manufacturing Point-of-Care Instruments

Remote health settings require affordable blood tests to provide care. ChipCare aims to reduce the cost of these tests by producing a user-friendly device the size of a credit-card reader. Disposable cartridges that go into the device will bring down costs. One aim of this project is to improve the design of the reader in a 3D modelling software. The newer version of the reader can then accept multiple sized cartridges. This will expand the detection scope by allowing multiple diseases to be detected. The other aim of the project is to develop a manufacturing method that will allow the above cartridges to be produced quickly. This involves using a
manufacturing tool called the Hot Embosser. The tool allows the cartridge design to be imprinted onto any plastic material. The turnaround time for the cartridges will be drastically reduced which will shorten the development time. The attainment of these two aims will allow ChipCare Corp to eventually mass-produce inexpensive medical testing kits.

Increasing energy conservation through tenant engagement in high rise buildings in Toronto

Residential high-rise buildings consume large amounts of energy for their cooling and heating needs. A large portion of this energy is wasted due to aging infrastructure, lack of proper maintenance, and occupants’ lack of awareness about energy conservation measures. While the economic and environmental benefits of physical retrofit of aging high-rises is well understood in terms of return of investment (ROI), the same understanding is very limited as it relates to economic, environmental as well as social benefits of engaging occupants. In recent years, a number of case studies have focused on strategies for engaging tenants in order to achieve additional savings beyond typical physical upgrades, however, there is still no coherent established practice that would identify a framework and tangible processes for a sustainable service involving tenant engagement strategies. Hence, this proposal aims to
identify, review and synthesize successful case studies in order to shed light on this area of research and inform the development of tenant engagement processes. This project benefits Imagine My City as it increases their capacity to advance its mandate to enable and increase productive and meaningful community-based research on issues related to the built environment.

Interactive visualization tool for managing advertising campaigns

The goal of this research is to investigate, design and evaluate user-adaptive visualization systems, which personalize interaction based on the individual needs of a given user. In order to achieve this goal, a visualization system is required as a starting point with which to carry out this research. As a first step, this research aims to build an interactive visualization tool that will better support East Side Games Studio at managing advertising campaigns. Proposed functionality will consist of aggregating data across multiple sources, better real-time tracking of ads, and ability to manage multiple ads within and between various advertisers. The overall
goal of this project is to increase the number players in their games as well as user spending and also providing the visualization tool for user-adaptive visualization system research of the intern’s PhD.

Development of novel electrospun nanofibrous membrane incorporating cellulose nanocrystals for wastewater treatment.

The proposed research project aims at developing a novel nanofibrous membrane incorporating cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) for wastewater treatment. Sustainable nanomaterials such as CNCs possess many interesting properties like high specific surface area, good mechanical strength, biodegradability and large amount of primary hydroxyl groups for surface functionalization. Hence incorporation of these CNCs can have synergistic effects on the membrane performance. Nanofibrous membranes can be created by electrospinning of polymers and CNCs incorporated into these nanofibres can be surface functionalized with noble metal nanoparticles or monolayer protected quantum nanoclusters to improve their sensitivity and selectivity to contaminants in water. Thus the proposed project will help in creating a novel wastewater treatment platform based on sustainable nanomaterial and an initiation of a successful international collaboration between prof. Michael Tam’s research group at University of Waterloo and Prof. Pradeep’s research group at IIT Madras.

Problème de conception d’horaire en sécurité aéroportuaire

Le problème de conception d’horaire en contexte de sécurité aéroportuaire consiste à établir un horaire qui minimise le nombre d’employés qui sont nécessaires pour faire fonctionner un nombre de points de contrôle, dans le but de desservir le flot de passagers qui se manifeste en réponse aux multiples départs d’avion. Le problème s’apparente au Nurse Scheduling Problem, qui est connu comme étant NP-difficile. Nous cherchons donc à créer de nouveaux algorithmes spécialisés afin de résoudre le problème de manière plus efficace que l’approche courante basée sur la recherche locale.

Recognition of Vehicles in Satellite Views

The intern shall endeavour to develop a vehicle detection system for aerial satellite views with a reasonable accuracy and a reasonable execution time for a small urban area of 100 sq. km. The intern first will train, test, and evaluate a machine learning engine to automatically recognized the vehicles of interest in aerial satellite imagery. The sponsoring organization, LTAS Technologies will have an engine and a process that can be repeated for each state in the USA. It could then provide the service to its customers which can also benefit by collecting taxes due on those vehicles.

A Condition Based Monitoring Pilot for the Baggage Handling System at the Pearson International Airport

Maintenance of baggage handling equipment, passenger boarding bridges and aircraft support equipment currently costs the Pearson International Airport (PIA) $10M annually. Much of this cost is associated with routine inspections, replacing drives, lifts and similar industrial process equipment. Current maintenance undertaken by PIA is reactive; replacing or repairing parts on the equipment after break-down. This is an expensive process. In this proposal, the intern will implement a condition based maintenance pilot on the baggage handling system (BHS) at PIA. An online vibration monitoring system will be implemented to collect vibration data from the BHS and this data will be interrogated to provide valuable information regarding their state in addition to the event data. This condition information will be combined to calculate the reliability of the unit as a function of its current condition and age, through a proportional hazard model and will be used for inspection planning.

: Identification of organic disinfection byproduct precursors at the Waterhen Water Treatment Plant

There are about 180 public water treatment plants in Manitoba relying on surface water with high organic content as their source of supply. Organic carbon in the water reacts with chlorine during water disinfection. This reaction forms carcinogenic compounds which pose a health risk for people consuming the water.

The Waterhen water treatment plant is an example of typical Manitoba treatment plant that is suffering from high organic carbon resulting in high concentrations of these carcinogenic byproducts.

Experiments will be conducted to evaluate the types of organic compounds in the water and to evaluate their removal throughout the Waterhen plant. Improving the removal of these compounds will improve the overall quality of water and health in the region.

Centre for Operations Excellence Industry Projects 2015

The Centre for Operations Excellence Industry Projects consists of five sub-projects sponsored by four different industry partners. Each sub-project represents an important challenge for its sponsor. These sub-projects include using analytics to optimize sawmill production for Interfor; production planning for Tree Island; developing text-mining techniques to enable WorkSafeBC to predict and
prevent workplace accidents; using Twitter data to enrich Boeing Canada’s maintenance and operations planning tools; and performing human resources analytics to improve Boeing Canada’s workforce planning.

Spatial pattern of wildlife habitat across heterogeneous landscapes in Atlantic rainforest near São Paulo, Brazil

Transitions between adjacent plant communities are important features of landscapes that might harbour greater diversity. However, forest edges created by human activities can have negative consequences for wildlife habitat. Both types of transitions dominate fragmented agricultural landscapes in tropical forests. Understanding the vegetation structure in such heterogeneous landscape could help predict animal movements across natural and anthropogenic transitions. This project compares the relationship between structural diversity and bird movement across different types of landscape transitions as part of a larger joint study on animal movement in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. The objectives are to determine the relationship between structural diversity and frugivorous bird assemblages and to compare seed distribution across forest edges and landscape transitions with different structure. The outcomes include an assessment of the usefulness of structural diversity as an indicator for wildlife habitat, which will be included
in the multidisciplinary research program on animal movement in Brazil’s forests.