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.
A joint letter from the Mary Wells, chair of the Ontario Network of Women in Engineering (ONWiE), and Andrew Hrymak, chair of the Council of Ontario Deans of Engineering (CODE), on behalf of all CODE members.
On December 6th, 2014 we will remember fourteen young women who lost their lives 25 years ago in 1989. On this day, known now as the “Montreal Massacre”, an enraged gunman, roamed the corridors of Montreal’s École Polytechnique and killed 14 women, 12 of whom were engineering students. Details of the event outlined how the gunman went into a classroom of engineering students on the last day of classes before exams began. He separated the men from the women and opened fire on the women. Many of these women were in their final year of study in their engineering programs and would have graduated in May 1990.
In 1989, it was an unusual choice for a woman to decide to enroll and study engineering in Canada. To put things in perspective, enrolment reports from 1989 indicate that of the 33,000 students who were enrolled in undergraduate engineering programs across Canada only 13% or 4,900 of the students were women. Statistics Canada numbers also show that at this time there were just over 3,300 faculty members teaching in these engineering programs with a very small fraction of these, less than 2%, being women.
The Montreal massacre sparked renewed interest and commitment to promote women in engineering and technology, to end violence against women and to strengthen Canada’s gun laws. In a more focused vein, the events of December 6th, 1989, forced the engineering community both in Canada and around the world to pause collectively and reflect on what the experience must be like for Women in Engineering and understand why women were not choosing to study engineering in greater numbers. Additionally, in 1991 the Canadian government established December 6th as a National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women (white ribbon day).
Following the Montreal massacre, the Canadian Council of Professional Engineers issued its groundbreaking report “More than Just Numbers” in April 1992 which documented the barriers that young women face when entering the engineering profession. This ignited a number of initiatives aimed at encouraging women in engineering and through the 1990’s the numbers of women enrolled in engineering programs across Canada steadily climbed. However in 2001, the trend reversed and the percentage of women enrolling in these programs started to decline. This may have been related to the overall decline in engineering enrolments that followed the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000-2001.
In response to this, in 2005, all of the Ontario faculties and schools of engineering and applied science made an unprecedented decision to work collaboratively to address the persistent low enrolment of female engineering students across the province through a the creation of a network now known as the Ontario Network of Women in Engineering (ONWiE). This initiative was led by Professor Valerie Davidson who at that time was the Ontario region NSERC Chair for Women Science and Engineering. The Council of Ontario Deans of Engineering (CODE) was so impressed with ONWiE and the value of a collaborative impact approach to support and encourage women in engineering that they committed to supporting the network financially to ensure its viability. Considering all of the Engineering and Applied Science schools across Ontario educate ~40% of all the undergraduate engineering students across Canada, this represents a significant and focused effort towards addressing issues around women in engineering. For the past nine years, ONWiE has provided a platform to work in partnership with respect to outreach programs to youth as well as best practices in positive messaging of the engineering profession and its diversity and the network is seeing success.
Fortunately over the past few years we have again begun to see an upward trend in the number of women studying engineering across Ontario and Canada and in September 2014 record high numbers and percentages of women entering 1st year engineering programs were seen across Ontario.
While good work has accomplished much over the years, it never hurts to remind ourselves that we can do more to ensure that our engineering and applied science schools and faculties are inclusive, equitable and safe for all members. We can also use this occasion of remembrance to express our commitment to strengthen our progress on issues related to women in engineering and ensure all of our schools and faculties continue to foster a safe and supportive campus community for all faculty, staff, and students in engineering. And, finally we remember those 14 young women who so tragically and needlessly lost their lives twenty five years ago. We will not forget them.
- Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student
- Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
- Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
- Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
- Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
- Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
- Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department
- Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
- Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
- Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
- Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
- Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
- Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
- Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student
– Andrew Hrymak, (Chair of CODE),
– Mary Wells (ONWiE Chair) on behalf of CODE Members:
- Carleton University
- Lakehead University
- Laurentian University
- McMaster University
- Queen’s University
- Royal Military College
- Ryerson University
- University of Guelph
- University of Ontario Institute of Technology
- University of Ottawa
- University of Toronto
- University of Waterloo
- University of Western Ontario
- University of Windsor
- York University
Originally published in the Fall 2014 issue of Edge Magazine.
There’s a revolution happening in the world of lighting, and Professor Zheng-Hong Lu’s (MSE) research into organic LEDs is leading the charge.
The award-winning researcher from the Department of Materials Science & Engineering is delving into the centuries-old puzzle of energy efficiency: how to provide high-quality light for a wide array of uses at an affordable cost.
Organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, are one of the latest breakthroughs in energy- efficient lighting that will alter the way we light our homes and cities in the future.
“OLEDs are very light, bendable and environmentally friendly—they are relatively safe to dispose of,” said Lu, the Canada Research Chair in Organic Optoelectronics and recent recipient of the University of Toronto’s 2013 Connaught Innovation Award.
Energy efficiency has driven innovation in the lighting world since Thomas Edison patented his incandescent light bulb in 1879. In the late 20th century, energy crises led to the creation of the more efficient compact fluorescent bulb that is still widely used for commercial and residential lighting needs.
LEDs emerged as an alternative, albeit with some bugs to be worked out. The early models were only as efficient as incandescent bulbs, they were costly to produce and the quality of the light they emitted was low.
Recent improvements to efficiency, quality and cost mean LEDs are now seeing widespread use for both commercial and residential purposes. However, they are still too expensive for larger scale applications, like lighting a large room or powering giant digital signage.
“Another major shortcoming of LEDs is their inability to reproduce or render all colors the same way as natural sunlight does, and solar grade lighting does have a positive impact on our physiological system,” added Lu.
OLEDs, the next advance in lighting, differ from LEDs in that the semiconductors used to convert electricity into light are not synthetic single crystals but rather films composed of organic molecules. While this organic component makes them lighter and greener, challenges still exist in translating this technology into widespread use.
“The current application of organic LEDS is for small, portable displays like cell phones,” said Lu. “This technology is capable of producing solar grade lighting and can replace incandescent light bulbs (for general lighting), but to do that, you really need to increase the brightness and make it more affordable.”
A research breakthrough in Lu’s lab involving chlorine appears to have tackled both issues. Two PhD candidates on Lu’s research team, Michael G. Helander (EngSci 0T7, MSE PhD 1T2) and Zhibin Wang (MSE PhD 1T2), observed that a sheet of indium tin oxide (ITO)—the substance used to make flat-panel displays—became brighter after it was cleaned with a solution containing chlorine.
Further research determined that when ITO is treated with a one-atom-thick layer of chlorine, just two OLEDs need to be stacked to produce bright light rather than several. The simpler design also means that an OLED flat panel display is very thin and flexible —you can actually bend it.
The end result is high brightness at a high efficiency, said Lu, plus a simpler manufacturing process that translates into a more affordable, high-quality lighting solution.
“Right now the major barrier is cost. When cost is down, people can use them everywhere—for signage, displays, anywhere you need a lot of light. Our solutions will make it more affordable.”
The breakthrough earned Lu and his research team a $100,000 Connaught Innovation Award.
Lu said the funding has been used to support the work of his PhD students to “mature the technology” and to support ongoing research and commercialization of the technology through a start-up company, called OTI Lumionics.
Lu believes the widespread use of OLEDs for general lighting and digital signage is still five to 10 years away. But he notes that LEDs are already available at retailers like Home Depot and Canadian Tire and it is only a matter of time before OLEDs become a mainstream lighting solution.
“It’s coming,” said Lu. “It’s really going to change the whole lighting technology, and we will be part of that revolution.”
Read about other Connaught Fund-related U of T stories in the Fall issue of Edge Magazine.