Researchers develop system to help prevent construction accidents and materials falling from buildings

Engineerblogger
April 30, 2012

Construction management experts at the University of Calgary's Schulich School of Engineering have developed a system that employs remote sensing technology to improve safety on construction sites by using tracking tags to monitor movements in real-time. Knowing the precise location of people, equipment and building materials will reduce accidents and could also help prevent materials from being placed too close to edges where they could fall.

Civil engineering professor Farnaz Sadeghpour and graduate student Reza Maalek developed the new tool, which uses Ultra Wide-Band signals, a type of radio frequency technology.

"Most construction accidents happen because of workers clashing with equipment and people or objects falling off edges. Our system will address both," says Sadeghpour, assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the Schulich School of Engineering.

While the tool is still under development, researchers plan to enable the system to trigger an alarm when someone gets too close to a certain piece of equipment or when a worker or a piece of building material gets too close to an edge. The warning could come in the form of an alert on a mobile phone or an urgent announcement on a worksite.

In 2009, a three-year-old girl was killed when a sheet of corrugated steel fell from a Calgary office tower that was under construction. A tracking system would help ensure materials are properly secured and kept a safe distance away from open thresholds. Other advantages include inventory and theft control. Removing an item from a site without authorization, for example, would trigger an alarm.

Ultra Wide-Band technology is becoming less expensive all the time and it could one day be widely used by industry as a cost-effective way to track important and valuable items.

Source: Calgary University

Manufacturing: Nature-inspired, 3D-Printed

Engineerblogger
April 24, 2012

Urbee with its completed 3D-printed body. Image: KOR EcoLogic Inc.

The first 3D-printed car body may set the pace for a new mode of manufacturing.

3D printing is a transformational technology. Originally used exclusively by engineering departments for verifying prototype designs, 3D printing is now being considered for mass production. Think of it as taking the mature technology of 2D digital printing, which reduced the role of the printing press, and carrying that digitizing idea into the third dimension.

Products, including a remote-control model airplane, a bikini, a titanium jaw bone, a bicycle, and a car body have been designed exclusively for the 3D printing process and manufactured on demand. These sophisticated designs were 3D printed because the 3D manufacturing process places the particles of material exactly where they are needed.

KOR EcoLogic Inc., Manitoba, Canada, has engineered a 3D-printed car body. The car project, called Urbee, began 15 years ago, spawned by the company's concern for the escalating global use of fossil fuels. The company's product designers wanted to act as catalysts for change and took a scientific approach to the redesign of the automobile. The designers believed a return to fundamentals and an emphasis on energy efficiency, were the keys to sustainability. The goal was to design the greenest car possible. The approach was to reduce the required energy low enough to power a practical car solely on renewable energy. The car that emerged from this novel approach was named Urbee, for Urban Electric.

The design element of Urbee that received the most attention was how 3D printing was used to fabricate the car's acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) plastic body. Previously, 3D printing was not considered suitable for body panels this large—finished panels measuring about 5 feet wide, 3 feet high, and 5 feet long, were made by dovetail joining four parts; each of the four parts were 3D printed.

The large parts were made for the vehicle with help from 3D printer manufacturer Stratasys (Eden Prairie, Minn.), CAD software developers Tebis (Troy, Mich.) and Autodesk (San Rafael, Calif.), simulation software provider CD-Adapco, and others. During this development program, the team became aware that this manufacturing process has significant potential for producing extremely light, strong, and environmentally benign structures.

The designers saw parallels between the honeycomb structure of beehives and 3D printing. They believe only the 3D printing process can create structures as sophisticated as found in nature; and can do so by using non-toxic materials and incorporating intelligence from human brains and electronic computers. The employment of simulation programs using high-performance computing (HPC), and 3D printing's unique ability to mass produce any result from these computers, is presenting new possibilities in product design.

Using HPC, a computer model can virtually test thousands or even millions of alternatives for optimal material composition, shape, and production process. Testing just a fraction of these options with physical prototypes would be prohibitively expensive. Although the modeling is feasible on a high-end PC, it would take too long. HPC allows a very large number of scenarios to be modeled accurately and quickly; the first physical prototype comes very close to the design specifications. For example, a small company currently is using HPC to design custom alloys for the aerospace industry, achieving superior mechanical performance, lower production costs, and replacing rare-earth materials with less expensive and more benign materials. HPC has even been used to analyze biosphere designs to understand how they achieve their structural performance.

Light and strong structures are currently being made primarily by the use of tooling and, at times, use of toxic materials. These materials and fabrication techniques are typically considered a necessity for mass production and for proper economies of scale. Although apparently efficient in the short run, these methods may prove quite uneconomic and problematic over any longer view.

The Urbee team plans to design and build a second Urbee prototype. This second car further explores the potential of 3D printing. All exterior and interior panels will be optimized and made on a Stratasys Fortus 3D printer. All of these strong, lightweight body and interior panels will integrate many functional requirements, such as ducting and wiring, while tightly encasing a tubular metal chassis and hybrid power train. All panels will be printed individually, one particle at a time, without need for any hard tooling.

Source: R&D Mag

“Duet of one” possible with hand-controlled voice synthesizer

Engineerblogger
Feb 21, 2012

New technology at the University of British Columbia makes it possible for a person to speak or sing just by using their hands to control a speech synthesizer.

UBC researcher Sidney Fels says the gesture-to-voice-synthesizer technology mirrors processes that human use when they control their own vocal apparatus.

“It’s like playing a musical instrument that plays voice. Applications could include new forms of musical expression and aids for people with speaking disabilities,” says Fels, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Faculty of Applied Science and director of the Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre (MAGIC).

Fels presented the technology today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver.

Fels and his team used special gloves equipped with 3-D position sensors that locate the hand in space. Certain glove postures are associated with certain areas in the audio spectrum.

The right-hand glove has sensors to detect bending so when a user closes her hand, it creates consonant sounds. Opening the right hand produces vowel sounds in the same fashion as a vocal tract does when the tongue moves. The left glove controls stop sounds – like the consonant “B”.

The researchers developed a set collection of gestures that are mapped to consonant sounds. The right glove controls vowels by its location in space horizontally and also controls pitch by its location in space vertically.

“Other possible applications for this discovery are interfaces to make certain tasks easier such as controlling cranes or other heavy machinery,” says Fels, whose research interests include human-computer interaction, biomechanical modeling of the upper airway, speech synthesis, and neural networks.

Co-investigators for this project are UBC School of Music Asst. Prof. Robert Pritchard and Johnty Wang, a UBC electrical and computer engineering masters student and concert pianist.

To date, there have been seven international performances with musicians playing a set of pieces written specifically for the expressive capacities of this particular instrument. “It takes about 100 hours for a performer to learn how to speak and use the system,” says Fels.

Source: University of British Columbia.

Where nanotechnology and medicine meet: Researcher shrinks medical tests, makes them more affordable

Canadian University Press
Jan 3, 2012

University of Alberta oncology professor Linda Pilarski, along with her research team, has created a microfluidic chip that can test for up to 80 different genetic markers of cancer. (photo courtesy Dammika Manage)

In a rural medical office, only the bare minimum of medical technology is either affordable or practical, and doctors rely on their own diagnostic skills rather than the expensive tests that doctors at urban centres can more easily access.

This can become a problem when a patient appears whose symptoms could represent a bad flu, but could also be indicative of cancer. In the absence of proper equipment from which many urban doctors benefit, rural patients can be misdiagnosed or mistreated due to the impracticality of running the gamut of tests on them.

Linda Pilarski, a University of Alberta oncology professor and Canada Research Chair in Biomedical Nanotechnology, has been working since 1998 to change this.

Researchers have made great strides in diagnostic tools for detecting the genetic abnormalities that lead to or signal cancers, but many of these remain solely the province of experimental labs because of practical impediments like the cost of equipment.

Aiming specifically to make clinical medicine easier and less expensive to conduct, Pilarski and her team have created a microfluidic chip about the size of a thumbnail that can test for up to 80 different genetic markers of cancer.

“Most of the things we were doing were much too complicated to do in a clinical lab,” Pilarski said. “Their technology has to be far more regulated than what we’re doing in the lab. It may be feasible [to use current experimental tests] in a big research hospital, but not in Stony Plains, in our little health care centre, for example.

“And with tests that are feasible, they’re feasible only because they study many samples at once.”

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia, for example, is a rare cancer that mostly affects children. When detected and treated early enough, it has an exceptionally high cure rate. But if left untreated, it can prove fatal in as little as a few weeks.
To read more click here...

Alberta's Oil Sands Heat Up

Technology Review
Oct 25, 2011

Steam solution: Pipes connect the wells at Christina Lake. One pipe delivers steam to the wells; the others return the ­bitumen-water mix and natural gas from the wells. Credit: Kristopher Grunert

For many, images of Canada's boreal forest torn apart by sprawling operations that clear the land and strip off the top layer of earth have come to symbolize the environmental evils of petroleum in the 21st century. The so-called surface mines, which uncover rock-hard deposits of sand and clay rich in the heavy, sticky mixture of hydrocarbons called bitumen, now account for a substantial portion of Canada's oil exports, including much of the petroleum going to the United States. But the face of the industry exploiting northern Canada's oil sands is changing—and possibly becoming even more troubling.

Head south or west from Fort McMurray, the Alberta boomtown hosting many of the strip mines and tailings ponds that have made the province's oil industry infamous, and the mines give way to tidier industrial sites amid boggy greenish-brown muskeg and stands of white spruce, jack pine, and aspen. These forest-ringed facilities have traded shovels and enormous trucks for an extraction process that drills down hundreds of meters into solid ribbons of bitumen and, using vast quantities of steam, melts the tarry petroleum in place. Liquefied bitumen then oozes out through a system of parallel pipes. Such "in situ" extraction operations now account for nearly half the current output of northern Alberta's oil business, and that figure will only increase. Alberta's 1.8 trillion barrels of bitumen may be the world's largest single accumulation of hydrocarbons, but four-fifths of this resource lies deeper than strip-mining can reach.

In situ extraction is expensive—on average, it's not profitable if world oil prices are below $60 per barrel. But with today's prices consistently well above that, the practice is booming. The oil sands will generate over 1.5 million barrels of oil per day this year, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, a Calgary-based group. That accounts for more than half the oil that Canada pipes to the United States (Canada is its neighbor's single biggest source of imported oil). By 2025, oil-sands production is projected to more than double, to 3.7 million barrels per day, and in situ operations will deliver nearly two-thirds of that boost.

The catch is that while the drilling might seem on the surface to be less destructive to the environment than strip-mining, in many ways the newer technology is far more damaging. Even though the drilling sites don't ravage the landscape the way the mines do, they use vast amounts of energy and consequently produce lots of carbon dioxide. Using steam to flush out bitumen accounts for 2.7 percent of Canada's total greenhouse-gas emissions, or an estimated 19 megatons of carbon dioxide last year—equal to the annual tailpipe emissions of 3.7 million cars. It creates more than twice the production emissions of conventional oil-sands mining. Independent experts say that by the time the bitumen is refined and delivered to gas stations across the United States, it has already accounted for two or three times as much greenhouse gas per gallon of fuel as gasoline refined from conventional crude.

Most worrisome, the drilling operations in the oil sands are just one example of the increased production of "unconventional" oil, formerly hard-to-exploit sources that recent technological advances have made economically viable. Such resources in the Americas alone include huge amounts of bitumen-like oil in Venezuela, deep undersea oil reserves off the coast of Brazil, and "tight oil" held in shale deposits throughout the United States and Canada. The geological resources and technologies used to produce unconventional oil vary greatly, but they all require extraction processes that are energy intensive and environmentally destructive. Oil sands are the principal reason why Canada's annual greenhouse-gas emissions, which the government promised to cut to 558 megatons by next year, now exceed 710 megatons and are projected to reach 785 megatons by 2020.

The reality is, however, that the world has quickly become reliant on unconventional oil, including the oil sands, as global energy demand has continued to grow faster than supply. And the Canadian economy, particularly in Alberta, has become heavily dependent on the growth of the oil-sands industry. Investments from Canadian firms and global oil giants totaled $13 billion in 2010 and grew to $16 billion this year. The oil sands have made Alberta the hottest place in Canada for jobs, investment, and growth, helping the country avoid many of the economic woes afflicting the United States and much of Europe.

The oil sands mean hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes and royalties, and job creation from Newfoundland to Vancouver. So many Newfoundlanders have come to Alberta to work in Fort McMurray that it amounts to "Newfoundland's third-largest city," says Murray Smith, a former Alberta energy minister. Such economic heft makes it a given that Canada is going to keep exploiting this resource, he says: "We're next door to a customer that has 250 million vehicles driving three trillion miles a year. You can be sure that as long as that demand is there, there will be product to sell. We'll produce the oil sands."
To read more click here...

New Process Could Make Canadian Oil Cheaper, Cleaner

Technology Review
Aug 3, 2011

New technology for extracting oil from oil sands could more than double the amount of oil that can be extracted from these abundant deposits. It could also reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from the process by up to 85 percent. The technology was developed by N-Solv, an Alberta-based consortium that recently received $10 million from the Canadian government to develop the technology.

Canada's oil sands are a huge resource. They contain enough oil to supply the U.S. for decades. But they are made up of a tarry substance called bitumen, which requires large amounts of energy to extract from the ground and prepare for transport to a refinery. This fact has raised concerns about the impact of oil sands on climate change. The concerns have been heightened by plans to build a new pipeline for transporting crude oil from the sands to refineries in the United States.

Most oil sands production currently involves digging up oily sand deposits near the surface and processing the sludgy material with heat and chemicals to free the oil and reduce its viscosity so it can flow through a pipeline. But 80 percent of oil sands are too deep for this approach. Getting at the deeper oil requires treating the bitumen underground so it can be pumped out through an oil well. The most common technique in new projects involves injecting the bitumen with steam underground. But producing the steam means burning natural gas, which emits carbon dioxide. And the oil that's pumped out is still too thick to flow through a pipeline, so it has to be partially refined, which emits still more greenhouse gases.
 To read more click here...

How Hydrostor Aims To Change The Power Game By Storing Energy Under Water

Tech Crunch
July 9, 2011

There has been a fair bit of concern in recent years about the ability of our power plants to supply adequate electricity during periods of peak demand. Hydrostor, a Toronto-based company, is taking a different approach in offering a solution that allows plants to store their power using compressed air in underwater storage tanks.

More specifically, Hydrostor takes the excess energy created during periods of off-peak consumption and converts that energy into compressed air via an air compressor, which in turn inflates accumulators placed under the surface of a body of water. The depth of the water keeps the air at a constant pressure, helping to store the energy potential.

When power is required, the air is released through an expander and electricity is produced. Through the heat-exchanger, modern compressors and expanders, the system approaches adiabatic operation, achieving efficiencies over 70 percent.

This technology has the potential to address the intermittent nature of renewable energy, help decongest transmission and distribution lines, and create better efficiencies of existing generation.

To read more click here...

Additional Information:

• Hydrostor website

Spray-on Solar Goes Double-decker

Technology Review
July 1, 2011

 A research team at the University of Toronto has created the first two-layer solar cell made up of light-absorbing nanoparticles called quantum dots. Quantum dots, which can be tuned to absorb different parts of the solar spectrum by varying their size, have been seen as a promising route to low-cost solar cells because the particles can be sprayed onto surfaces much like paint. But cells based on this technology have been too inefficient to be practical. By discovering a way to combine two different types of quantum dots in a solar cell, the researchers could open the way to making such cells much more efficient.

Conventional solar cells are tuned to convert light of only one wavelength into electricity; the rest of the solar spectrum either passes through or is converted inefficiently. To harness a greater percentage of the energy in sunlight, manufacturers sometimes stack materials designed to capture different parts of the spectrum. A two-layer cell, called a tandem-junction cell, can theoretically achieve 42 percent efficiency, compared with a maximum theoretical efficiency of 31 percent for cells with a single layer.
To read more click here...

U of T engineers crack solar challenge

University of Toronto
June 27, 2011

In a paper published in Nature Photonics, U of T engineering researchers report a new solar cell that may pave the way to inexpensive coatings that efficiently convert the sun’s rays to electricity.

The researchers, led by Professor Ted Sargent of electrical and computer engineering, report the first efficient tandem solar cell based on colloidal quantum dots (CQD). “The U of T device is a stack of two light-absorbing layers - one tuned to capture the sun’s visible rays, the other engineered to harvest the half of the sun’s power that lies in the infrared,” said lead co-author Xihua Wang, a post-doctoral fellow.

“We needed a breakthrough in architecting the interface between the visible and infrared junction,” said Sargent, Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology. “The team engineered a cascade - really a waterfall - of nanometers-thick materials to shuttle electrons between the visible and infrared layers.”

According to doctoral student Ghada Koleilat, lead co-author of the paper, “We needed a new strategy - which we call the graded recombination layer - so that our visible and infrared light harvesters could be linked together efficiently, without any compromise to either layer.”

The team pioneered solar cells made using CQDs, nanoscale materials that can readily be tuned to respond to specific wavelengths of the visible and invisible spectrum. By capturing such a broad range of light waves - wider than normal solar cells - tandem CQD solar cells can in principle reach up to 42 per cent efficiencies. The best single-junction solar cells are constrained to a maximum of 31 per cent efficiency. In reality, solar cells that are on the roofs of houses and in consumer products have 14 to 18 per cent efficiency. The work expands the Toronto team’s world-leading 5.6 per cent efficient colloidal quantum dot solar cells.
To read more click here...

Government of Canada Helps Science and Engineering Graduates Enter the Workforce

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

June 01, 2011

An investment by the Government of Canada will give young researchers in universities across the country an opportunity to expand their skills and help them transition from trainees to productive employees in the Canadian workforce. The Honourable Gary Goodyear, Minister of State (Science and Technology), made the announcement while speaking at Queen's University.

"Our government is focussed on what matters to Canadians—the economy and jobs," said Minister Goodyear. "To remain at the forefront of the global economy, our government is investing in the people and ideas that will produce tomorrow's breakthroughs."

The projects announced today are being funded through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)'s Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) Program.

Eighteen projects will receive a total of $29.6 million over six years to help science and engineering graduates add job skills to their academic expertise. The projects explore a variety of research areas, including neurotechnology, clean energy, freshwater conservation and bionanotechnology.

To read more click here...

New R&D program to help Canadian companies compete globally

Automationmag
April 25, 2011

The launch of a new federally funded national internship program will help Canadian companies compete in the global marketplace through advanced research and development. Connect Canada, a $5-million, five-year program, was launched at an event hosted by Chrysler Canada at the University of Windsor-Chrysler Canada Automotive Research and Development Centre (ARDC).

In its five years of funding, Connect Canada expects to place 750 graduate students at companies across Canada in all economic sectors. For a small investment, companies will be able to hire a dedicated graduate-level student intern to investigate research issues relevant to their business needs. Interns will gain valuable industry experience while working on R&D projects that enhance their graduate studies.

To read more click here...

Medical Isotopes Could Be Made Without Nuclear Reactor

Theengineer.co.uk
Jan 31, 2011


Canadian researchers are racing to perfect a safe, clean, inexpensive and reliable method for making isotopes used in medical imaging and diagnostic procedures.
To read more click here...