U of T Engineering researchers have developed a paper-based diagnostic system for use in some of the world’s poorest countries. Awarded $112,000 by Grand Challenges Canada’s “Bold Ideas” initiative last month, the system is being touted for its potential impact on infant and maternal health in developing nations.
“Every hour, 11 infants are born with congenital rubella syndrome (CRS) and 18 children die of measles,” said researcher Alphonsus Ng (IBBME MASc 0T9, PhD Candidate), one of the lead designers of the technology.
Professor Aaron Wheeler (IBBME) and his team of researchers, including Ng, are developing a low-cost, portable system to detect measles and rubella infection status and immunity.
Using a small machine called the DropBot, health practitioners can run four concurrent tests on one droplet of blood. They insert a thin strip of paper, approximately one inch wide by three inches long, into a testing platform. Printed for less than a dollar by a standard ink jet printer, the paper has an innovative circuit-like design that actually generates light once the machine digitally manipulates the blood sample. The whole process takes 35 minutes.
In some of the world’s poorest nations, those 35 minutes could have life-changing impact.
Rubella—sometimes referred to as “German measles”—can be passed by pregnant mothers to their unborn children with devastating effects that can include severe developmental problems, blindness and stillborn births. The WHO estimates that approximately 110,000 children are born with congenital rubella syndrome (CRS) every year—but that statistic does not account for the number of women who miscarry or experience other pregnancy-ending complications from the disease.
“Vaccinating children is great,” explained Ng. “But the entire population still needs to be monitored, because there will still be vulnerable segments of the population, and that can lead to serious health risks.”
In the next 18 months, the team plans to test their technology on 200 patient samples in Vietnam.
“Vietnam is a hotspot for measles and rubella because they don’t have a common rubella vaccination yet,“ said Ng.
It’s also a country in dire need of diagnostic resources: Vietnam has only two diagnostic labs, one in the south and one in the north. Introducing a rapid, economical field diagnostic tool could have an enormous impact on this country of 97 million and lead to better-informed public health policies.
Testing the technology in the field will also allow the team to work on fine-tuning the technology specifically for the poorest nations.
“It costs us maybe a dollar to print the [paper] test chips, but printing these in an industrial setting would cut costs by another order of magnitude,” explained Ryan Fobel (IBBME PhD Candidate), one of the innovators behind the DropBot.
The team is also looking at ways to cut the cost of manufacturing the DropBot machine to a few hundred dollars, which would put the technology into far more hands, and potentially allow everything to be manufactured within the host country, generating local jobs.
“This is a great opportunity to bring digital microfluidics out into the field to address a real world problem,” said Wheeler. “I am proud to be working with such a motivated, enthusiastic team.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDgAV7tOx0A]
James Milton Ham (ElecE 4T3), the 10th president of the University of Toronto and former Dean of Engineering, was posthumously selected for induction into the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame. Ham was a leading Canadian engineer and a public servant who made enormous contributions to the safety of Canada’s mining and metallurgy industries and the development of the Occupational Health and Safety Act in Ontario.
The Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame is a central part of the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. It honours individuals whose outstanding scientific or technological achievements have had long-term implications for Canadians. Ham will be inducted into the Hall of Fame on January 20, 2015.
James Ham was an alumnus of U of T’s Electrical Engineering program, graduating with the highest marks ever awarded in the Faculty at that time. After graduation, he served in WWII in the Royal Canadian Navy. He joined U of T Engineering in 1953. Ham served as chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering from 1964-66 and as dean of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering from 1966-73. He was dean of the School of Graduate Studies from 1976-78 and served as president of the University of Toronto from 1978-83. He was appointed President Emeritus in 1988.
As President, Ham spearheaded an effort to make universities centres for research and innovation—an idea we take for granted today. Ham chaired a special committee on university research, sponsored by the Council of Ontario Universities. His report proposed that research should become the centrepiece of Ontario’s economic development strategy and that this research should be based in universities. The Centres of Excellence program was developed in response to this report.
After his term as President, Ham helped to found the Canadian Academy of Engineering, for which he served as President from 1990-91. He was also a founding member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Perhaps Ham’s most influential contribution was as the author of the “Ham Commission Report” on health and safety in the mining industry. The report of this commission was the impetus for the creation of the Occupational Health and Safety Act in 1978.
In 1989, Ham was inducted into the Order of Ontario. In 1980, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in recognition of his achievements as a “scientist, engineer and scholar who has had a distinguished academic and administrative career”.
“Professor James Ham applied his engineering competencies to the benefit of his field, his university, his province and his country, changing them all for the better”, said Dean Cristina Amon. “His career is an inspiring example of the extraordinary impact engineers can have as leaders and public servants.”
Originally published in the 2014 issue of ANNUM Magazine.
A single unpruned tree was all it took.
On Aug. 14, 2003, one hot day in a hot summer, a power line sagged onto some branches in the small village of Walton Hills, Ohio. The resulting cascading failure throughout Ontario and the northeastern United States shut down power to more than 10 million people, becoming the second-most-widespread blackout in history and a major wake-up call for power generators and electric utilities operators around the world.
The grid has gotten a lot smarter since then, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement. “The building-up of intelligence on our network will continue to go forward forever—there will never be an end,” says Charles Esendal, manager of research, development and demonstration for Hydro One. “It’s not a destination, it’s a journey.”
Helping accelerate that journey are professors Reza Iravani, Zeb Tate and Josh Taylor. Each is collaborating with Hydro One on a project to make Hydro One’s network more robust for the 21st century, by improving power-system stability and monitoring, use of energy storage, and integration of distributed energy resources, including intermittent renewable generation such as wind and solar power.
The three projects launched in 2014 and will run for two years under the guidance of a steering committee composed of Esendal and Birendra Singh from Hydro One, ECE Chair Professor Farid Najm, and professors Reza Iravani and Peter Lehn.
Islands in the Storm
The current grid’s interconnectivity, a strength when all runs smoothly, becomes a liability in adverse conditions—Americans witnessed this after Hurricane Sandy blasted the northeastern U.S. in October 2012, shutting down vast swaths of the system. As severe and unpredictable weather events increase in frequency, the ability to isolate and operate sections of the grid independently and sustainably is a high priority.
“If some event happens upstream in the system and you get disconnected, you become an electrical island,” says Professor Iravani, who has had much successful collaboration with Hydro One and its predecessor, Ontario Hydro, since 1991. “We should be able to operate these islands in order to provide resiliency to the system, so it doesn’t completely shut down—it should be self-sustaining.” Professor Iravani is validating methods for isolating and controlling subsections of the grid within the larger system, and integrating renewable energy sources into these microgrids. Others have experimentally demonstrated this kind of microgrid islanding, but nothing has been validated and implemented on a larger scale.
The good news: all the essential elements of islanded microgrids—distributed resources, loads, transmission and monitoring infrastructure—are already in place on Hydro One’s network. The challenge is to control them effectively, whether they’re functioning as part of the whole or on their own.
“The components are there, but the point is to provide enough intelligence, decision-making and control for that mode of operation,” says Professor Iravani. “All the components should be individually controlled, and all the controls should be coordinated to enable unified operation of the system. That’s what we’re aiming for.”
The Great Green Unknown
We all know fossil fuels aren’t cheap, clean or abundant—but what are we doing about it? Plenty, it turns out—the high market penetration of solar generation from individual consumers, and the uptick in electric vehicles in need of a charge are introducing unknowns into the grid on both the supply and demand sides.
“It is great to be able to say ‘Let’s use the sun’s rays or the wind to generate electricity,’ but it’s very transient in nature,” says Esendal. “You cannot predict the trend at all, and that is the worst thing that you can have on the grid. The system requires accurate anticipation and prediction to be able to plan and dispatch the electricity where the need is. Unfortunately that is a major challenge in integration of renewable generation.”
What if you could bottle up some of that wind or sunlight for later, and redistribute it when need is high? “The most basic constraint on the power system is that supply must equal demand,” says Professor Taylor. “Renewables make the supply random, but storage can make it controllable—the question is how best to do that.”
Conventional storage meant pumping water up a hill and releasing it, converting potential to kinetic energy to make electricity—though it sounds old-fashioned, the method is quite efficient, but expensive and geographically restrictive. Professor Taylor is looking at both batteries and flywheels for more flexible, distributed storage and is developing an algorithm to make smart decisions about optimal locations and conditions to either store or release energy.
Ready for Anything
When a line overheats due to excessive current, as in the great blackout of August 2003, the power transferred by that line needs to be redirected, and utilities operators need to “reposition” the system in order to maintain stability. “In 2003 they didn’t know the lines were out, so they didn’t know they needed to reposition the system,” says Professor Tate. Operators learned the hard way that accurate information is everything, and afterward deployed much more sophisticated monitoring methods.
Professor Tate is working on a project to use these smarter monitors, called synchrophasors, to detect faults in the grid and automate rapid responses. Synchrophasors sample and relay magnitude and phase data between 30 and 60times per second, a vast improvement on old sensors that are polled only once every two to three seconds. “This gives you a much better idea of how power is flowing immediately, so you can tell whether a line is disconnected or a generator is down,” he says. “Improving detection fosters efficiency—you don’t have to run the system as conservatively if you know you can react instantly.”
“There are a lot of challenges today—these are only a few issues that we have,” says Esendal. “It will take some time to validate all of these technologies, but we needed to start somewhere and I think University of Toronto is in a great position, not only from the expertise perspective, but also to be located just in our backyard—it’s a great advantage.”
If all goes according to plan, you’ll never know how these projects turn out—you’ll just be cozy during the next deluge of freezing rain, cool throughout the sweltering summer, and connected in the next flood, hurricane or hail storm. And soon August 2003 will be just another unbelievable anecdote of times long past.
ANNUM Magazine is an annual publication from The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering.
People used to say that the journey was as important as the destination. But that was back when travel was exotic and exciting—before voyagers were so infuriated by gridlock, so concerned about safety and so consumed with their carbon footprint that the journey became something to endure, rather than savour. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Researchers from U of T Engineering are collaborating with leading industry and government partners on projects that aim to ease travel worries, minimize delays and reduce our impact on the environment.
Click on the icons below to explore three of these promising projects, originally shared in the 2014 issue of Skulematters.
Simulation city: solutions for a better urban commute
Transit planning for large urban centres doesn’t always involve simulations. But for those interested in evidence- based transit strategies, simulations have become so sophisticated and detailed that they can map commuter behaviour right down to the individual level.
“I’m interested in understanding and modelling travel behaviour,” said Eric Miller (CivE), civil engineering professor and director of the University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute (UTTRI). “I try to simulate the city itself—how the population is changing in terms of the labour market, housing market, demographics and so on. It’s SimCity for real.”
Through UTTRI’s Travel Modelling Group, Miller works with city and municipal governments, Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation and regional transit organizations such as Metrolinx.
The group has developed innovations like MARLIN, Professor Baher Abdulhai’s (CivE) “smart traffic light program” that dynamically reacts to local traffic flow, reducing commute times.
Miller’s simulations embody a level of complexity and granularity that was unimaginable even a decade ago.
“We’re building ‘agent-based micro-simulation models,’” he said. “We create a synthetic population: if there are six-and-a-half-million people in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area, we model every one of these people and say, ‘What are you going to do today?’”
Ministries and municipalities use Miller’s models to run simulations that inform policy decisions. But he thinks his group could contribute more on the policy front.
“We don’t see the agencies necessarily doing as much as they could to ask ‘What if…’ questions and dig deeply into the possibilities,” he said, stating that his data provide insight into not only transportation policy, but also the population itself.
“We’ve found through these agent-based models that people are more often than not to act fairly rationally,” he said. “From a policy point of view, it’s encouraging to know that if you do provide people with a better alternative, they will respond to it.”
How’s my driving? Never mind—I’ll ask my car
A research-intensive company—say, an automobile manufacturer—tends to keep discoveries secret. It maximizes their competitive advantage. A university researcher, on the other hand, circulates knowledge widely for the benefit of the public.
Which might be why Birsen Donmez (MIE), industrial engineering professor and driver-safety researcher, still seems so surprised and delighted, two years through her three-year collaboration with Toyota.
“A few years ago, Toyota allocated a chunk of money to support safety research in North America,” said Donmez. “They said, ‘This doesn’t have to be confidential research. We just want to support the study of important problems related to traffic safety.’”
Donmez proposed a single experiment related to speeding and tailgating behaviours, which Toyota requested she expand into a multi-year program, involving a combination of driver-simulation studies and analysis of crash data.
“Toyota wanted us to tell them how to provide feedback technologies that would benefit drivers without distracting them,” she said.
Donmez and her team are working on both immediate warnings and post-drive “report cards” that assess a driver’s overall performance.
“We can follow people’s eye movements in real time and if they take their eyes off the road for longer than two seconds, we can tell,” she said. But they’ve found they must be selective about instantaneous warnings, as too many beeps or lights become a distraction unto themselves.
A report card can be much more detailed—documenting risky behaviour, and putting it in the context of both the driver’s individual history and also general norms and best practices.
Donmez said the report card is likely most effective for new drivers, who are just establishing their road habits, but that it also has potential benefits for aging drivers.
“Older people who are losing some of their abilities tend to self-regulate,” she said. For instance, some people give up highway trips or driving at night when they realize it’s no longer safe. “Maybe we can help them regulate better.”
How do I leave a footprint when I’m not touching the ground?
Jets, once the epitome of exotic travel, now face a hard truth: lifting a crowd of people into the sky and carrying them a long distance requires a large amount of energy. High fuel consumption and carbon footprints, in part, can temper the thrill of takeoff, burdening it with ecological guilt.
“The environmental impact of aviation is quite broad,” said David Zingg (UTIAS), professor and director of the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS). “In addition to flights themselves, there is airport operation, as well as manufacturing and disposal of aircraft.”
Researchers from UTIAS’s Centre for Research in Sustainable Aviation attack issues like greenhouse emissions on many fronts, from improving aircraft design to developing climate-friendly biofuels. They also work with industry partners like Bombardier and Pratt & Whitney to ensure their work is grounded in the real-life concerns of the aerospace industry.
Zingg’s background in computational fluid dynamics means he focuses on innovative aircraft designs that reduce drag. He spent three years working with Bombardier on airplanes that barely resemble conventional “tube-and-wing” models. With names like “box-wing” and “blended wing-body,” his designs optimize airflow and reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse gases.
“I benefited more from this collaboration than from any I’ve ever done,” said Zingg. “[Bombardier] gave us funding to advance our algorithms, but they also gave us the opportunity to apply them, which is when you really learn whether your methodology is effective in the real world.”
The partnership with Bombardier has helped shape Zingg’s next avenue of research—a “truss-braced wing” design that may lead to a new generation of environmentally friendly jets.
“Truss-braced wing models might be the most promising designs for certain classes of aircraft in the next 15 years,” he said.
Poking at your smartphone with your finger is so 2014—it’s time to find new ways to interface with the mobile devices we all carry.
That’s the challenge Professor Parham Aarabi (ECE) of The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at University of Toronto posed to his graduate class.
“I encouraged students to think outside the box of how we interact with mobile devices, including wearables,” said Aarabi. “I wanted them to think: can we do better?”
On Dec. 8, the top seven projects—emerging from more than 35 developed—were unveiled at a showcase on U of T campus. Projects went well beyond the screen, leveraging microphones, accelerometers, GPS and cameras to make life easier and more intuitive for users.
“None of the applications here are complex—complexity is not the objective,” said Aarabi. “The objective is to reinvent the ways we interact with mobile devices.”
Ahmadul Hassan (ECE MASc 1T6) demonstrated a simple remote control that lets you play or pause video just by flipping your phone over. “Gestures aren’t always perfect,” said Hassan. “I think there’s a certain learning curve, but people are interested in learning how to use these features.”
The finalists were:
- Barcode Passport—Never carry a wallet again with a virtual barcode that replaces all your cards
- Whistle Finder—Lost your phone? Whistle for it, and it whistles back
- Motion Cam—Forget fumbling for buttons—take a picture with a flick of the wrist
- Clap Controller—Ditch the handheld clicker and clap to advance a presentation
- OweME—Who still owes you for dinner last night? Keep track of money leant and borrowed
- PlaceIt— Ever wish you had virtual location-based sticky notes? PlaceIt is exactly that, reminding you of notes as you arrive at different destinations
- TV Controller—The simplest way to control a TV show or movie from your phone
The final seven groups revealed their designs in front of an audience including reporters from Gizmodo and OMNI News. Look for their products on the App Store or Google Play, and start 2015 ahead of the curve.
Pretty soon, powering your tablet could be as simple as wrapping it in cling wrap.
That’s Illan Kramer’s (ECE) hope. Kramer and colleagues have just invented a new way to spray solar cells onto flexible surfaces using miniscule light-sensitive materials known as colloidal quantum dots (CQDs)—a major step toward making spray-on solar cells easy and cheap to manufacture.
“My dream is that one day you’ll have two technicians with Ghostbusters backpacks come to your house and spray your roof,” says Kramer, a post-doctoral fellow with the Ted Sargent group in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, and IBM Canada’s Research and Development Centre.
Solar-sensitive CQDs printed onto a flexible film could be used to coat all kinds of weirdly shaped surfaces, from patio furniture to an airplane’s wing. A surface the size of your car’s roof wrapped with CQD-coated film would produce enough energy to power three 100-Watt light bulbs—or 24 compact fluorescents.
He calls his system sprayLD, a play on the manufacturing process called ALD, short for atomic layer deposition, in which materials are laid down on a surface one atom-thickness at a time.
Until now, it was only possible to incorporate light-sensitive CQDs onto surfaces through batch processing—an inefficient, slow and expensive assembly-line approach to chemical coating. SprayLD blasts a liquid containing CQDs directly onto flexible surfaces, such as film or plastic, like printing a newspaper by applying ink onto a roll of paper. This roll-to-roll coating method makes incorporating solar cells into existing manufacturing processes much simpler. In two recent papers in the journals Advanced Materials and Applied Physics Letters, Kramer showed that the sprayLD method can be used on flexible materials without any major loss in solar-cell efficiency.
Kramer built his sprayLD device using parts that are readily available and rather affordable—he sourced a spray nozzle used in steel mills to cool steel with a fine mist of water, and a few regular air brushes from an art store.
“This is something you can build in a Junkyard Wars fashion, which is basically how we did it,” said Kramer. “We think of this as a no-compromise solution for shifting from batch processing to roll-to-roll.”
“As quantum dot solar technology advances rapidly in performance, it’s important to determine how to scale them and make this new class of solar technologies manufacturable,” said Professor Ted Sargent (ECE), vice dean, research in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering at University of Toronto and Kramer’s supervisor. “We were thrilled when this attractively manufacturable spray-coating process also led to superior performance devices showing improved control and purity.”
In a third paper in the journal ACS Nano, Kramer and his colleagues used a Blue Gene/Q supercomputer owned by the Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform (SOSCIP) to model how and why the sprayed CQDs perform just as well as—and in some cases better than—their batch-processed counterparts. SOSCIP is an R&D consortium consisting of 11 southern Ontario universities and the IBM Canada Research and Development Centre. This work was supported by the IBM Canada Research and Development Centre, and by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.