Innovative Projects Realized

Development of soil quality guidelines for use in health risk assessments of contaminated pipeline compressor station sites

Intrinsik has identified a number of key chemical-pathway combinations that are missing environmental quality guidelines but frequently required for evaluating risks at pipeline compressor stations. With support from senior scientific personnel at Intrinsik, the intern will used environmental risk assessments methods to develop risk-based environmental quality guidelines that are relevant to the land use scenario(s) typical of pipeline compressor stations. The intern will benefit from this topical research project through the completion of the three objectives that will require the application of current risk assessment methods. Further, the intern will have the opportunity to gain valuable work experience in a fast-paced environmental field with experienced industry professionals. As the partner organization, Intrinsik will benefit through the development of soil quality guidelines for a set of chemical-pathway combinations that currently do not exist for land use scenarios like those applicable to pipeline compressor stations.

Development of Innovative Tools for Conducting Health Impact Assessment of Major Infrastructure Projects

None given.

Terahertz Time Domain System to Characterize Performance of Terahertz Quantum Cascade Laser Sources

In this project, we plan to address the specific application and problem that TeTechS Inc is facing at this stage of its product development of photoconductive antennas, which is using its photoconductive antennas for characterizing performance of quantum cascade lasers (QCL) in time-domain measurement setup by demonstrating the capability of its proprietary terahertz sensor technology to be used by researchers in University to characterize QCL and in industry for building terahertz spectrometers with high signal and bandwidth. TeTechS have designed, fabricated and marketed various photoconductive antennas that can be used in a terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) measurement setup. This project will increase the new photoconductive antennas we design and market for various applications. We believe that TeTechS’ technology can serve in many stages of characterizing QCL and obtain improved and enhance QCL performance in terms of gain, spectrum and operating temperature.

Research Study into Impact of E-mail on Employees

The proposed research to be undertaken is an investigation into the relationship between electronic communication (E-mail, text messages, and Instant Messages) and key employee/employer outcomes (Employee outcomes include: work-life conflict, perceived stress, depressed mood, and anxiety; Employer outcomes include: engagement, work-role overload, job satisfaction, and work related stress. The research may also look at scales for constructs in the organizations which help moderate the relationship between electronic communication and key employer outcomes in the third phase of the research (Moderators include: supportive manager, perceived organizational support, and organizational culture).

Evaluation of tools for assessing organic chemicals for human health and ecological exposure and risk assessment

Society uses thousands of chemicals and the potential risks to humans and the environment for the vast majority of these chemicals are largely unknown. It is not feasible to measure all of the chemicals and there are substantial data gaps; therefore, models are required to screen and evaluate chemicals for potential exposures and risks to humans and the environment and to address data gaps. ARC Arnot Research & Consulting develops models for screening-level exposure and risk assessment. There is a need to test these models. This project includes the development of monitoring databases and subsequent testing of the models.

Embedded Low Power Signal Processing for Passive Acoustic Monitoring

This project will attempt to explore the solution space around a number of key issues related to passive underwater acoustic monitoring. Namely the mitigation of acoustic flow noise in turbulent environments, digital compression techniques for underwater acoustic data and the implementation of real time signal processing algorithms related to the detection of marine mammals on ultra low power processors.

The impact of high frequency offenders on the operation of the criminal justice system in British Columbia

This internship is designed to analyse the impact of high frequency offenders (HFO) on the criminal justice system in British Columbia. Research indicates that HFOs have a substantial impact on police reported offences, the court system and the corrections system. Through a partnership with the Ministry of Justice of British Columbia and Sierra Systems, an IT service and consulting firm, the internship will work on business analytics to support HFO analysis for data experts and business experts within the MOJ. The work includes leveraging the expertise of the intern on the operational databases of the MOJ, which were built and are maintained by Sierra Systems. The first part of the internship is devoted to the extraction and analysis of HFO data and includes a report on the outcomes of the analysis. The second part is focused on developing, calibrating and validating a queue network model that differentiates between HFOs and non-HFOs and tracks the differential resource consumption of accused and offenders through the court and corrections systems. The mathematical model will provide the MOJ with a planning and analysis tool for policy changes in regards to HFOs.

Vision Guided Robotics for Laser/MIG Welding Seam Tracking

Weight reduction has been one of major driving forces of research and innovation in automotive industries. Changing from the conventional Laser overlap welding to edge welding could save 50% of total weight of joint flanges of workpiece. Also, edge welding can significantly improve the welded joint mechanical properties. However, edge welding is challenging since the thin laser beam needs to be guided on the joint constantly within tight boundaries. For this reason, project of vision-guided robotics for laser/MIG welding seam tracking is proposed. The idea is to use a vision sensor to track the joint constantly and accordingly correct the laser welding TCP trajectory when any deviation is detected. The research mainly includes finding a suitable vision sensor, designing an algorithm of noise filtering and edge detection, examining approach of laser TCP trajectory correction, and implementation of system integration. Benefits of a vision-guided robotic laser edge welding system will be reduced weights and higher quality welds.

Design and Analysis of a Platform to Connect Patients, Providers, and their Social Networks

Assessing emergency shelter patterns to inform solutions to homelessness

Numerical Weather Forecast Advances for Clean Energy Production

The objective is to create new weather-forecast products to enable BC Hydro meteorologists to better support electric-power generation, power transmission, dispatch of emergency repair crews, anticipation of electric loads, and energy trading. The method is to use powerful computers to solve atmospheric equations for future weather (a method called Numerical Weather Prediction, NWP), and to improve and tailor the output as specified by BC Hydro. Projects include improvements of: extreme-weather “situational awareness”, turbulent boundary-layer effects, hourly precipitation forecasts, “nowcasts” that combine NWP with local observations, forecasts for electrical transmission and distribution, statistical correction of forecast biases, understanding and forecasting of wind and wind ramps at wind turbines, the ability of an ensemble of forecasts to account for chaos in the atmosphere.

Impact of early vaccination during influenza outbreaks