Fourteen U of T Engineering faculty members and staff have been honoured for their outstanding contributions to the Faculty with teaching, research and administrative staff awards. These awards recognize exceptional faculty and staff members for their leadership, citizenship, innovation and contributions to the Faculty’s teaching, service and research missions.

“As we navigate our way through — and out of — the pandemic and toward an uncharted future, our innovative engineering faculty and staff continue to meet and overcome each and every challenge we face. They are setting a world-class standard across our research, teaching and administrative operations,” says Dean Christopher Yip. “On behalf of the Faculty, I extend my warmest congratulations to the awardees and my heartfelt thanks to all our faculty and staff members for their hard work, resilience, creativity,  tenacity and dedication.”

The award recipients from MIE are:

Aliz Karami, Celeste Francis Esteves, Oscar Del Rio (MIE)

Innovation Award (Administrative Staff Award)

Recognizing a staff member or team of staff members who has shown innovation in developing a new method, technology or system, or improving an existing system, to the benefit of the Faculty.

This team is being recognized for working together over the past few years to develop MIE’s Graduate Management System (GMS) into a multipurpose software tool that is integral to running the MIE Grad office.

The GMS was originally created in 2014 to monitor the progress of PhD candidates through their program. The team has vastly enriched GMS by expanding its use to MEng and MASc. students, pivoting to online exam management and adding personalized funding information that can be accessed by students and staff. In 2021 the team was able to connect the system to ROSI/ACORN, allowing for student information to populate into GMS automatically. This achievement has made it significantly easier to maintain registration information, as staff no longer need to collect data from multiple locations.

Most recently, the team has added enhanced communication features that allow students to use the system to contact the graduate office with queries; questions and responses are recorded in the student file, easily retrievable by both parties. GMS is now the backbone of MIE graduate studies administration, providing a better experience for both staff and students.

Scott Sanner (MIE)

McCharles Prize for Early Career Research Distinction (Research Award)

Recognizing exceptional performance and distinction in early career research.

After receiving his PhD in Computer Science at U of T in 2008, Scott Sanner was a principal investigator at National ICT Australia and an assistant professor at Oregon State University. He joined MIE in the Industrial Engineering program in 2016 and was promoted to associate professor last year.

Sanner’s research spans a broad range of topics, from the data-driven fields of machine learning and information retrieval to the decision-driven fields of artificial intelligence and operations research. Sanner has applied tools from these fields to diverse application areas, such as conversational recommender systems, adaptive user interfaces and Smart Cities applications like predictive health analytics, transport optimization and residential HVAC control.

He has received several prestigious awards for his accomplishments, including two best paper awards (one for optimal traffic signal control and one for novel optimization techniques with applications to deep learning), as well as two first-place results in international machine learning competitions. In 2020 he received a Google Faculty Research Award for his conversational recommender systems research.

Marianne Touchie (CivMin, MIE)

McCharles Prize for Early Career Research Distinction (Research Award)

Recognizing exceptional performance and distinction in early career research.

Marianne Touchie obtained her PhD in Civil Engineering at U of T in 2014. She was a Building Research Manager at the Toronto Atmospheric Fund before returning to U of T as a postdoctoral fellow, then joining the faculty in 2016.

Touchie’s research is focused on performance assessment and retrofit development for multi-unit residential buildings. Specifically, she is developing strategies for reducing building energy use while improving the quality of the indoor environment for occupants. Touchie has taken an interdisciplinary approach to this work, collaborating with researchers in architecture, public health and urban planning, as well as a large network of industry and government partners. Touchie’s research has already impacted policies and practices related to building energy use by organizations such as Toronto City Council, Toronto Community Housing and Toronto Hydro.

In 2018, she garnered The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers’ New Investigator Award, given out to only one recipient per year globally. She received the Ontario Building Envelope Council’s Rising Star Award in 2021.

Early Career Teaching Award (Teaching Award)

Recognizing an early career educator who has demonstrated exceptional classroom instruction and teaching methods.

Jointly appointed to CivMin and MIE, Marianne Touchie has made outstanding teaching contributions in both departments.

For MIE, Touchie redeveloped and teaches MIE507:HVAC Fundamentals, a course MIE has rarely been able to offer due to lack of expertise. In 2020 she added new field trip and lab components to this course, which she redesigned as virtual experiences during the pandemic. Despite this being a difficult and technical course, she has garnered outstanding student evaluations. For her CivMin Building Sciences course, Touchie created a unique campus walking tour to demonstrate issues that affect aging buildings.

In all her courses, she brings her award-winning research into the classroom, seeks out and implements student feedback and works to develop a sense of community — for example, by providing a forum for students to share music and recipes. As a PhD student in CivMin, Touchie worked with Kim Pressnail to develop and teach Building Science courses, which are still offered by the School of Continuing Studies. More recently, they co-created more than 100 online videos on building science for an eCampusOntario project.

See the full list of Engineering professors and staff who received awards.

A team from U of T Engineering has placed among the Top 60 in the Milestone Round of the global XPRIZE Carbon Removal.

“It feels amazing,” says Celine Xiao (MIE PhD candidate), one of the members of Team E-quester. “We didn’t know what would happen because this round of the competition was open to everyone in the world, not just students. It’s a big honour.”

Last fall, Team E-quester was one of only 23 teams to earn a Student Award in an earlier phase of the competition. That honour came with US $250,000 in seed funding, which the team has used to further develop their prototype.

On February 1, they submitted their latest results to qualify for one of 15 Milestone Awards, which each carry a value of US $1 million and will be awarded on April 22. The Top 60 list, announced today, was created from nearly 500 submissions, and is the shortlist from which the Milestone Award winners will be selected.

A four-year competition, XPRIZE Carbon Removal is funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation. It invites innovators and teams from anywhere on the planet to create and demonstrate solutions that can pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or oceans, and sequester it durably and sustainably.

Team E-quester is led by Xiao and Shijie Liu (MIE MASc candidate). Other team members include former MIE postdoctoral fellow  Yi (Sheldon) Xu (now at Stanford University) as well as Rui Kai (Ray) Miao (MIE PhD candidate) and Colin O’Brien (MIE PhD candidate).

They are advised by Professors David Sinton (MIE) and Ted Sargent (ECE), MIE research associate Christine Gabardo, and alumnus Alex Ip (ECE PhD 1T5). Many of these researchers are also involved in CERT Systems, a spin-off company that aims to commercialize the group’s unique technology.

Their goal is to lower the energy cost of a carbon capture technique known as Direct Air Capture, or DAC. This is an established method that begins when ordinary air is pumped through a strongly alkaline liquid solution. The CO2 in the air gets converted into a set of chemical compounds called carbonates, which remain dissolved in the liquid.

Today, the standard way to recover the dissolved carbon is to precipitate the carbonates as a solid salt, then convert them back into a gas using high temperatures generated by burning fossil fuels. But this method is both energetically expensive and produces its own carbon emissions, which undermines both the economic viability and the environmental benefit of the overall DAC process.

Team E-quester is using electrochemistry to provide an alternative pathway. In their system, a series of electrically-driven chemical reactions, powered by custom-designed electrocatalysts, converts the dissolved carbonates directly into CO2 gas, eliminating the precipitation and heating steps.

“In traditional DAC, for every tonne of CO2 you capture, you still end up emitting between 0.3 and 0.5 tonnes of CO2, most of which is due to the heating step,” says Liu.

“Based on the data we’ve gathered from our lab-scale prototype and the detailed technical analysis we carried out, we believe that our electrochemical process could get this down to 0.038 tonnes of CO2, a reduction of about 90%. In our best-case scenario, we also reduce the overall energy requirement by about 11%.”

Watch U of T Engineering researchers Celine Xiao and Shijie Liu describe their electrochemical process for more efficient carbon capture and storage.

Xiao says that the team has made several improvements to their system over the past few months.

“With our Student Award, we were able to purchase better materials for the catalyst and for other components, and to manufacture systems that were more tolerant of the strongly alkaline liquid we were working with,” she says. “We demonstrated stability for longer periods of time, in addition to lower energy requirements that lead to increased efficiency.”

“We are very proud of what the team has accomplished and excited about their prospects, both in this competition and the global challenge of drawing down atmospheric CO2,” says Sinton. “Go E-quester!”

The team is hoping that the progress they have achieved will put them in a good position to vie for the competition’s US $50 million Grand Prize, to be awarded in the fourth year of the competition.

“We know the competition is tough, but we definitely want to try our best to go for it,” she says. “Regardless of what happens, we know that DAC is important, and will have a place in our future efforts to get to carbon neutrality. That’s our goal for the future.”

Every Friday, four students from the University of Toronto hop on a Zoom call with students in Nigeria to share updates on their joint mission: building a low-cost biogas generator for remote communities in Africa’s most populous country.

The meetings are a part of the Global Classrooms project, which brings together students in U of T’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and Nigeria’s Covenant University. The international student team is using cassava peels and other agricultural waste to produce gas for cooking and heating — a more environmentally friendly and less toxic alternative to the burning of wood for fuel.

Jennifer (Chen Yu) Wang (Year 4 ChemE), one of the four U of T students working on the biogas generator, says the experience has been an eye-opener.

“It’s very different designing for the developed world compared to designing for a developing world context,” says Wang. “You have to approach it differently because you have a lot of constraints to work with. You might go in with a design or prototype, but there are a lot of aspects that need to be taken care of beyond the technical design.

“That’s one thing that a lot of engineers aren’t exposed to — or at least, I wasn’t. It really challenged my thinking.”

The project is the focus of a multidisciplinary capstone course that’s supervised by Professor Ariel Chan (ChemE) and Professor Emeritus Graeme Norval (ChemE). It immerses the students in a real-world engineering challenge within a Global Classrooms setting, where cross-cultural collaboration and international learning are front and centre.

“The Global Classroom enables our students to be placed in a learning environment that’s not limited to U of T — it’s in the world,” says Chan. “It helps them understand a real-life problem in a different part of the world and explore how they can use their engineering concepts to tackle it.”

Chan’s course is one of 52 U of T Global Classrooms funded by U of T’s International Office, spanning 96 partners across 34 countries and running between Summer 2021 and Summer 2022. The Global Classrooms initiative supports professors and instructors who want to provide a globally relevant educational experience to their students. The program is currently accepting applications for the 2022-2023 cycle until May 13, with decisions on funded proposals to be made in early June.

“Creating a Global Classroom requires dedication, passion and a little bit of innovation for you to understand how you can take what you’ve been teaching in the same way, for perhaps a few months or a few years, and internationalize the opportunity,” says Professor Elham Marzi (ISTEP), who also served as one of three faculty advisers for the Global Classrooms initiative in its first year.

Marzi says Global Classrooms provide students with a priceless opportunity to expand their perspectives, hone cross-cultural skills and develop compassion and empathy for people in other countries around the world and the challenges they face.

“We’re hoping for every student here to be able to come away not only with global competency skills, but also with a better understanding for their fellow human,” she says.

Indeed, as Wang and her fellow U of T students go about creating simulations and designs for a generator, they’re required to adapt to resources and conditions in rural communities in Nigeria — information that is studied and supplied by the students at Covenant University under the supervision of Professor David Olukanni.

U of T team member Truman Yuen (Year 4 ChemE) says Global Classrooms creates real-world challenges that are difficult to replicate “even in internships,” given the variability of standards and protocols in countries around the world.

“When we’re creating a design that is unprecedented and new in a developing country, there are so many other things to consider that we don’t think about,” Yuen says. “So, this is a nice experience which, when we tackle future designs, will help us appreciate how the standards and roles that are put in place for us here help with our design process.”

The project also helped students hone a variety of soft skills, according to Jenny Pham (Year 4 ChemE), whose duties included serving as the point of communication between the two teams of students and their professors.

“We had to coordinate different timelines and deadlines, making sure that we’re able to communicate our points or discuss deliverables with the other team,” says Pham. “Working with people on the other side of the globe in such a big team really improved those soft skills for us.”

Wilson (Wei Cheng) Yeoh (Year 4 MechE) noted the importance of developing a rapport with the students in Nigeria.

“At the beginning of the project, we had to spend time not just talking about the technical aspects but also about ourselves and our expectations,” he says. “The cultures and norms that apply to our university context might not be the same for the other university. That’s one thing I learned the most.”

For Yeoh, an international student from Malaysia, the project was also an opportunity to develop skills that might be helpful back home where, he notes, vast amounts of agricultural waste are generated each year.

“If I have the chance, I’d love to take what I’ve learned collaborating with Nigeria and apply it in Malaysia,” he says.

The students weren’t the only ones to find the Global Classroom a fulfilling learning experience.

“It pushed me to consider a lot of possibilities in engineering design and allowed me to see how design can be flexible and how a variety of combinations can be used to achieve the same result,” says Chan, their professor.

“But also, [it taught me] compassion and helped me see how I can be of use beyond just teaching — by contributing as a global citizen.”

– This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on April 14, 2022 by Rahul Kalvapalle

Professor Kevin Golovin (MIE) analyzed 12 different face masks to investigate connections between discomfort and protection.

Wearing a face mask, when combined with other protective measures, has been shown to help slow the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19. But there are still many misconceptions about the relationship between a mask’s level of protection and its comfort.

Professor Kevin Golovin (MIE) — along with his Durable Repellent Engineered Advanced Material (DREAM) Laboratory research team — recently completed a comfort assessment of face masks to determine if masks that offer a greater degree of protection, such as N95 respirators, lead to additional discomfort for the wearer.

The group found the most important factors in selecting a comfortable face mask include size and fit, and that masks that offer more protection do not cause a decrease in comfort.

Writer Lynsey Mellon spoke with Golovin about the findings, presented in a paper recently published in the open access journal PLOS ONE.

Why did the DREAM Laboratory decide to conduct this experiment?

We know wearing a face mask helps to minimize exposure to and stop the spread of COVID-19. We’ve also learned that multi-layer masks offer the best protection. However the most common reason individuals give for not wearing a mask, or choosing to wear a mask that offers less protection, is comfort. We wanted to validate if there was actually a correlation between face mask discomfort and the level of protection the mask offers. To do so, we collaborated with the Apparel Innovation Centre in Calgary, as well as textile scientists at The University of British Columbia.

What kind of discomfort do people experience when wearing a mask?

Most of the discomfort people experience when wearing a face mask is thermophysiological, meaning the mask interferes with our body’s ability to regulate its temperature through heat transfer. The hot air we exhale increases the temperature and moisture levels in the areas covered by the mask. This can lead to the wearer feeling too warm, a damp feeling on the mask or the mask clinging to the skin, which some wearers may find difficult to tolerate for long stretches of time.

What type of face masks did your team investigate in this study?

We constructed 12 different layered face masks in three sizes using a variety of commercially available fabrics such as silk, polyester/cotton blends, cotton and polypropylene. We also studied the effect of N95 filters as well as antimicrobial and water repellent finishes on some of the fabrics. We wanted to systematically compare enhanced-protection masks, such as an N95, with those that offer less protection, such as a two-layer fabric mask.

How were the tests performed?

To test the various face masks that we constructed, we used a sweating thermal manikin, Newton, that was fitted with heaters, temperature sensors and sweating nozzles. The thermal manikin is modelled after the average adult male.

Each of the masks was fitted onto the manikin and then we assessed how the thermophysiological comfort levels were impacted by the mask size, fit and fabric properties.

Can you give us a summary of your findings?

Our research showed that wearing any face mask affects the body’s ability to transfer heat and moisture in the areas covered by the mask, meaning all face masks are somewhat uncomfortable. However, we found that adding the additional layers of protection, such as an N95-grade filter or an anti-viral coating, had a statistically insignificant effect on heat and moisture transfer.

These results show that added layers of protection do not cause any significant decrease in thermophysiological comfort and so individuals should opt for a mask that offers the highest level of protection, and ensure it is the proper size and fit for their face to maximize both protection and comfort. Contrary to popular belief, safer masks are not more uncomfortable.

-Published April 8, 2022 by Lynsey Mellon, lynsey@mie.utoronto.ca

With global demand for dynamic, reliable and renewable energy storage solutions on the rise, Professor Gisele Azimi (ChemE, MSE) and her Laboratory for Strategic Materials are investigating new battery chemistries that could offer superior performance and enhanced safety. 

Renewable energy from intermittent sources — such as solar or wind power — requires reliable energy storage systems to hold excess energy and release it when and where it’s needed. Today, lithium-ion batteries have emerged as the most common form of energy storage and are used in devices from portable electronics to electric vehicles. 

But lithium-ion technology has many inherent disadvantages that can make it impractical for utility-scale energy storage. 

“We need an alternative to lithium-ion batteries,” says Azimi. 

“It needs to be safe, since lithium-ion batteries are inherently flammable. It also needs to have equal capacity or better. It must be low-priced so we can utilize the metal at scale, and it has to exist in abundance since lithium and cobalt are difficult to source.” 

Lithium-ion batteries also have an environmental and human cost. Extracting lithium requires large amounts of water and energy. As for cobalt, most of the world’s supply is found in just one country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where elements of the metal’s supply chain have been linked to human rights abuses, corruption and child labour.  

In response to these challenges, Azimi’s lab group has singled out aluminum as a promising substitute for lithium and cobalt.  

“Aluminum is the third most abundant metal on Earth, and it’s very cheap — lithium costs about $60 U.S. per kilogram, while the same amount of aluminum is only $3 U.S.,” Azimi says.  

“The gravimetric and volumetric capacities of aluminum are quite high, comparable or even higher than those of lithium; thus, when used in batteries, they can lead to superior battery performance in terms of capacity and energy density.” 

The lab group’s work on high-performance and cost-effective aluminum batteries for electric transportation and renewable energy storage has been awarded a 2022 Connaught Innovation Award. 

“The focus of our research is on the development of cheap and reliable electrolyte systems as well as the cathode materials,” she says. “Through this new funding, we want to look at the potential high-performance cathode materials that can be combined with our newly developed electrolyte and deliver batteries with capacities that are three times higher than conventional lithium-ion batteries.” 

The project is one of nine from across U of T Engineering to receive funding from the Connaught Innovation Awards, which supports research that addresses challenges facing global societies.  

“It’s a pleasure to receive this prestigious award,” says Azimi. “It’s especially important to me and my lab group because we have a system that is developed and patent-pending, and this funding will help us reach the next step, which is the commercialization of this technology.”  

“If this aluminum-ion battery can be enabled, its lower cost, higher safety and resource abundance means it can be utilized at a large scale. We will then be able to generate large batteries that can be combined with solar parks for utility-grade energy storage.” 

The other eight projects funded by this year’s Connaught Innovation Awards are: 

• Thermal spray fabrication of liquid cooled heat sinks – Professor Sanjeev Chandra (MIE) 
• Target acquisition games for measurement and evaluation (TAG-ME) of detailed brain function – Professor Mark Chignell (MIE) 
• Low-cost camera for motion-tolerant adaptive high-dynamic-range imaging – Professor Roman Genov (ECE) 
• Smart wound dressings for active control and skin tissue regeneration – Professor Ben Hatton (MSE) 
• Tools and techniques to perform comprehensive security assessment – Professor David Lie (ECE) 
• Take home neurostimulation for depression: prototype development and proof of concept clinical trial – Professor Milos Popovic (BME) 
• Cell culture medium to improve the maturity and utility of induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes – Professor Craig Simmons (MIE)  
• CLP: Efficient and Scalable Search on Compressed Text Logs – Professor Ding Yuan (ECE)  

– This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on March 31, 2022 by Safa Jinje

U of T Engineering’s Matthew Mackay (MIE) is this year’s recipient of the University of Toronto Joan E. Foley Quality of Student Experience award. This award recognizes a member of the U of T community who goes above and beyond the requirements of their job, resulting in a broad and long-term positive impact on the quality of the student experience at the University.

Mackay currently serves as the Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering (MIE), and was responsible for leading a multi-year initiative to improve lab development and integration within the program’s mechatronics stream.

Mackay transformed the stream, creating new courses and overhauling outdated ones to bring in hands-on design and building experiences.  As a result of his efforts mechatronics is now the most popular stream in the program, taken by more than 90% of mechanical engineering students.

“Students now complete a design and build project in their third year. They get the opportunity to design their own circuit board for a real project, and build it start to finish,” said Mackay. “This is a really unique experience that our program offers.”

In addition to the improvements to the mechatronics stream, Mackay implemented a “design spine” within MIE — a continuous stream of courses with tightly integrated design projects and supporting laboratory experiences, that build upon each other from first year through the fourth-year capstone design course. He is also responsible for the creation of the course ‘Mechanical Engineering Design I’ to ensure that regardless of a student’s path through the program they will have the opportunity to tackle real-world design problems.

Professor Mackay also led the creation of a central space for students involved in traditional mechanical and mechatronics design. This makerspace, called the “M-Space,” has now been active for five years. Mackay then designed both lab series and design projects to leverage the M-Space that were integrated into mechanical engineering courses allowing students to experience a design project from inception to the final product.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, as courses moved online the makerspace also found a way to function virtually, allowing no-contact prototyping services for students who need them. Mackay also collaborated with the department’s lab team to move traditional labs online, so that students could remotely operate real hardware as part of their online learning.

Professor Mackay is currently heading a committee within the Faculty to bring Electric Vehicles (EV) to the curriculum.

“This is a very hot topic with a lot of interest from students,” said Mackay. “We envision MIE being the hub for the EV curriculum with new lab space and the opportunity for strong specialization for undergrads, right from second year, with the creation of an EV minor.”

In 2014 Mackay received MIE’s Early Career Teaching Award and in 2017, the Faculty’s Early Career Teaching Award. In 2020 he was awarded the Wighton Fellowship, which is given to one engineering professor nationwide for excellence in laboratory development and teaching.

“It’s wonderful to see Matthew’s innovations and achievements recognized by the University,” says MIE Department Chair Markus Bussmann, “His dedication to improving learning experiences and creating opportunities for our students is part of what makes U of T Engineering such a fantastic place.”

-Published March 28 , 2022 by Lynsey Mellon, lynsey@mie.utoronto.ca

On March 13, four students from U of T Engineering took the top spot in the category of Senior Design at the 2022 Canadian Engineering Competition.

The championship team consisted of Kushagra Goel (Year 3 CompE), Bobby Graydon (Year 4 MechE), Karman Lochab (Year 3 ElecE) and Ajeya Madhava Rao Vijayakumar (Year 3 MechE).

“We’re all incredibly excited about our win,” says Lochab. “Competition weekend was stressful and draining so it took some time to fully digest. Now, after some well-needed rest and a lovely chat with Dean Chris Yip, we’re beginning to fully appreciate what we achieved.”

The 2022 Canadian Engineering Competition was hosted by the University of New Brunswick. This year’s competition was held virtually, with students connecting online from their home institutions across the country. The U of T Engineering team gathered in the basement of the Myhal Centre, an area specifically dedicated to student design teams.

In the Senior Design category, student teams are presented with a complex open-ended engineering design problem, and they are given only eight hours to design their solution.

Eight teams from across Canada qualified for the national competition. These teams were tasked with designing, constructing and testing an efficient mechanical energy storage system for a wind farm in New Brunswick.

The finished prototype needed to capture the energy generated over a period of one minute, store it for one minute, and then release the energy slowly over a two-minute period.

“We were given very basic materials and tools, such as dowels, hot glue and tape,” says Goel. “We didn’t have a lot to work with: no axels for our gearbox, no spool for the rope — in fact, we didn’t have any rope. We had to make one out of thread.”

The prototype created by the U of T Engineering team included a gearbox and a tower that enabled them to hoist a weight 16 feet into the air, making use of gravitational potential energy to store what was generated by the wind farm.

“I think the secret to our success came from the diverse experiences and skill sets that the four of us brought to the team,” says Graydon. “We benefited from a careful and efficient distribution of tasks that we refined from our experience at the provincial level.”

Graydon was competing at CEC for the second time; in 2021, he and his sister Jenny Graydon (IndE 2T0 +PEY) formed a team that placed third in the Senior Design category.

The team’s win is reflective of the rich student experience that the U of T Engineering community has worked hard to maintain throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

“U of T has so many great design teams — from the Concrete Toboggan Team to Blue Sky Solar Racing — where you are able to learn practical skills beyond what you get in the classroom,” says Vijayakumar. “That was absolutely critical to being successful in this competition.”

– This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on March 24, 2022 by Tyler Irving

For PhD candidate Nitish Sarker (MIE), the drive to build a more sustainable world through the practice of global engineering comes from a very personal place.

“Growing up in a lower middle-income country like Bangladesh, I have seen first-hand how critical certain technologies can be in the water and energy sectors,” he says. “That is the underlying motivation behind all of my work.”

Sarker recently earned the Global Engineering Outstanding Student Award from the Mortenson Center in Global Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. The award seeks to highlight the work of individuals who contribute to the field of global engineering.

“The level of growth in the global engineering community has been really strong in the past decade,” says Ahmed Mahmoud, Program Manager at U of T Engineering’s Centre for Global Engineering (CGEN).

“CGEN has been at the forefront of supporting and inspiring students in this area. To see one of our students receive this award is a tremendous validation of our efforts and a stellar endorsement of U of T’s commitment to sustainable global development.”

In the Water and Energy Research Lab of Professor Amy Bilton (MIE), Sarker’s thesis project focuses on leveraging solar power to provide drinking water to remote, rural or low-income communities.

“These communities often lack access to electrical grids or centralized water infrastructure and treatment plants, so they are hard to service,” says Sarker. “There are already some stand-alone treatment plants out there, but we need to reduce the costs associated not only with building them, but also maintaining them.”

Sarker gives the example of reverse osmosis (RO), which uses electricity to pump water through membrane filters to remove dissolved minerals, as well as bacteria and other pathogens. In parts of Bangladesh, private companies and NGOs operate small-scale RO plants and sell the filtered water to customers in kiosks similar to ATMs.

“That solution works, but grid electricity is expensive and often unreliable or unavailable, which impacts the cost of the water produced,” says Sarker. “Solar power eliminates the need for a grid, and is also affordable. The cost of solar panels is getting lower every day, and once you install them, you are essentially getting energy for free from the sun.”

But solar power may introduce a new problem: when the sun goes down, the pumps stop working. RO filters are designed to operate with constant pressure across the membrane, so turning the pumps on and off can reduce their operating life. In particular, it can exacerbate the problem of scaling, in which dissolved minerals in the water deposit on the surface of the filter, reducing its effectiveness.

In their lab, Sarker and Bilton developed a framework for evaluating RO scaling in real-time and at different length scales. The system allowed them to explore different ways to prevent scaling while still operating the pump intermittently, as would be required for a solar-powered installation. The solution they hit on was surprisingly simple: an optimized rinse cycle.

“We optimized an end-of-the-day rinsing process that could be used in a battery-less, solar-powered RO system using the water produced on any given day,” says Sarker. “While doing so, we lose about two percent of the water we filtered, but we’ve shown that it makes a big difference to the filter maintenance. It also improves the efficiency such that over the course of a week, we actually produce more clean water than if we didn’t use the rinsing cycle.”

Though it may seem like a minor improvement, extending the life of the filter and the associated reduction in maintenance can make a big difference in regions where both replacement parts and technical expertise are hard to find.

“Nitish’s project is an excellent example of how engineering research can address some critical barriers towards adoption of clean water technologies in remote communities,” says Bilton. “We’re planning towards field evaluation in the near future.”

Sarker is optimistic about the potential global impact of the innovation.

“Our solution doesn’t require any expensive chemicals or a separate infrastructure, and thus is readily applicable to water-stressed locations worldwide,” says Sarker. “Around the world, there are more than 800 million people who don’t have any water treatment at all. This kind of solution could really help them.”

– This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on March 22, 2022 by Tyler Irving

On March 5, more than 200 participants from across Canada and the U.S. joined NSBEHacks, a 24-hour virtual hackathon. Now in its fourth year, the 2022 event aimed to redesign digital technologies that don’t serve marginalized communities. 

Organized by the U of T chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE U of T), NSBEHacks is the first Black student-run hackathon within the Greater Toronto Area. 

“This year’s theme was ‘Disruptive Innovation,’ and by the end of the weekend, we received an influx of solutions that we could have never envisioned,” says Chetachi Ugwu-Ojobe (Year 3 EngSci), president of NSBE U of T. 

One problem that NSBEHacks teams tackled is algorithm bias, where errors or assumptions in a system’s machine learning process can lead to prejudices and create unfair outcomes. 

D’SpeakerVerse, the team that won first place in the hackathon’s U of T Engineering Challenge, noticed that many voice assistant services alienate individuals by misunderstanding their accents. 

In response to this problem, they created an interactive platform where users can take part in voice games and tongue twisters to test the voice-to-text AI, with the goal of improving accent recognition for voice AI services through collected data.  

“This team was able to create a disruptive innovation by building on something that already exists in the market and opening it up to people who are neglected by these services — people with non-Western accents who are often misunderstood and left frustrated by popular voice services,” says Genevieve Aguigwo (Year 2 MechE), vice-president of NSBE U of T.  

The event also sought to cater to the specific needs of Black audiences in fast-paced digital environments, such as virtual reality.   

The Barbershop team, which won second place in the event’s Google Cloud Challenge, used virtual reality to create a welcoming online space that replicates the sense of community found in many Black-owned barbershops.  

“Barbershops hold a historical significance to many Black communities. It’s not just a place to get a haircut, it can also serve a therapeutic role,” says Ugwu-Ojobe.   

“The Barbershop team created a virtual space that allows people who are unable to visit a barbershop, because of the pandemic or personal challenges, to gather, share information and stay connected with their community.”  

NSBE U of T is committed to supporting participants beyond the hackathon, as they take their designs to the next level.  

“We are partnering with the Black Founders Network to give our design teams a platform to bring their ideas to life and make a business out of it,” says Ugwu-Ojobe.  

“Having a network of people in the industry who they can turn to with questions and reach out to in the future really ties in with NSBE’s own goals to support the professional development of our community,” adds Aguigwo.  

“At the end of the day, we’re trying to increase the representation of Black individuals in engineering and industry.” 

– This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on March 10, 2022 by Safa Jinje

When Christine Gabardo joined CERT Systems in 2019, she found herself in the midst of a five-year global competition to address rising greenhouse gas with breakthrough technologies.

The team had reached the semi-finals of the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE thanks to a process that fuses chemistry, materials science and mechanical engineering to transform CO2 into ethylene — used to make an assortment of everyday items, from shampoo to fabricated plastics and mattresses.

Gabardo took a lead role in helping CERT — which grew out of research in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering — advance all the way to the finals by scaling up their reactor, originally the size of a Rubik’s cube cell, by more than 10,000 times to process 100 kilograms of CO2 per day.

“I found it really interesting that electrochemistry could be used to tackle one of our world’s biggest challenges, which is climate change,” says Gabardo, the co-founder and director of technology at CERT and a former U of T post-doctoral researcher.

“It’s exciting to get to work with cutting-edge technology, especially on something no one has done before.”

At present, fossil fuels are used to produce an estimated 158,000,000 tons of ethylene per year.

CERT, by contrast, uses water and electricity to turn waste CO2 into ethylene and other carbon-based fuels using an electrocatalyst operating at room temperature and atmospheric pressure. The catalyst is able to break and reform CO2 into larger, valuable molecules with electricity and protons from water. The process allows CERT to make a chemically identical ethylene otherwise produced from fossil fuels.

“If we can decarbonize ethylene production, then we can decarbonize all of the materials that are downstream from it,” says Gabardo, who is also a research associate in the Sinton Group.

“That will help tackle CO2 emissions from the chemical industry all the way down to consumer goods.”

Co-founded by Gabardo and Alex Ip (ECE PhD 1T5), CERT is backed by research from two engineering labs led by Professors Ted Sargent (ECE) and David Sinton (MIE).

CERT is also supported by Breakthrough Energy Solutions Canada, which brings some of the nation’s top clean energy leaders and investors together to accelerate companies offering new solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

For Gabardo, balancing the worlds of science, technology and entrepreneurship has always been in the cards. She says she’s been fascinated with the idea of inventing things since childhood.

“I’ve always been interested in starting a company,” says Gabardo. “I just didn’t know when in my career that would happen.”

“I thought, ‘I just want to join a startup,’” Gabardo says.

Like fellow co-founder Ip, Gabardo came from a technical background. She studied electrical and biomedical engineering at McMaster University, where she developed electrochemical devices for point-of-care diagnostics for infectious diseases. While her technical skills were transferable to scaling CERT’s CO2 conversion technology during the XPRIZE competition, the company also needed support to grow the business beyond academia and into commercialization.

So, CERT leaned on U of T’s entrepreneurship community — in particular, the University of Toronto Early Stage Technology Program (UTEST). The program supports U of T entrepreneurs who are building research-based companies and offers a range of services, including investment capital, business strategy and mentoring. That includes providing startups with educational and networking support through MaRS, an intensive entrepreneurial education program that connects entrepreneurs with a range of local professionals and investors.

“It’s not obvious how you even start a company,” Gabardo says. “We were able to tap into the startup community at U of T and ask valuable questions. Just being honest about what you need help with and asking for resources will accelerate how you can get started.”

With a lab currently under construction on U of T’s downtown campus, CERT will soon be able to continue their work where their journey first began. The pilot unit will allow CERT to continue to refine their process in order to improve their efficiency and produce ethylene and other products (such as ethanol) at a meaningful scale.

For Sinton, the move couldn’t come at a better time, particularly with the university’s plan to achieve a climate positive St. George campus by 2050.

“U of T has been hugely supportive of the project,” Sinton says. “They’ve embraced us and looked at this pilot plant as a U of T facility — and one that is now coming home.

“CERT and the team are in an exciting place. They’re really mature for a startup company and have the opportunity to grow quickly because of all the work they’ve done with their technology.”

Gabardo says CERT is currently focused on growing its team, exploring raising seed funding, as well as forging more strategic partnerships. In the next five years, Gabardo hopes to increase the capacity of CO2 that CERT’s pilot reactor can process per day, scale into a commercial unit and work with industrial partners to produce valuable products.

She makes it a priority to mentor and support other women in the lab and co-op students who work for CERT, saying it is important to ensure women see themselves in leadership roles.

“It’s hard to enter a field where it’s typically male-dominated and there aren’t that many people you can relate to,” Gabardo says. “Trying to be that example for other people is something that I think is important.

“If you’re interested in something and have the passion to pursue it, don’t let people’s opinions stop you. Continue working on it no matter what.”

– This story was originally published on the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering News Site on March 8, 2022 by Tina Adamopoulos