Sixteen students and four faculty members from the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering (MIE) depart today to visit Peking University (PKU) in Beijing, China.
The four-day visit is the first face-to-face meeting for the cross-cultural capstone design project teams and their supervisors.
Capstone design is a fourth-year course requirement, where students apply their disciplinary knowledge and skills to conduct an engineering analysis and design for an industry-based need. A total of five projects, three from MIE and two from PKU, are included in the cross-cultural branch of capstone, where the project is shared between two international universities.
While the lengthy travel time and jetlag must be faced, Sahil Gupta (MechE 1T3 + PEY) has never before been to China, and is excited to meet his project teammates on the other side of the world.
Since the start of the term, Gupta and his three MIE team members have been communicating with their four PKU counterparts over Skype.
“Our PKU teammates have to submit their own program deliverables, as do we, and it’s interesting to see what the differences there are,” said Gupta of the group collaborating to compile one report.
His team’s project is a Portable Assisted Mobility Device (PAMD), a small power-assisted vehicle that can transport an individual and small item of luggage, but is also lightweight enough to be taken on public transport and carried. Their project is also part of the Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering Education (PACE) global challenge, a two-year project for which U of T Engineering received PACE’s second place for industrial design.
“We’ve been reworking last year’s design and seeing if there are alternatives,” said Gupta. He and his teammates will develop a PAMD prototype this year.
“Getting a different perspective from external input can really change the way you think, and help you develop more ideas,” said Gupta of the experience to date. “Given how businesses operate today, we as engineers will work with more people globally.”
The brief visit to Peking University will require all teams to prepare for project presentations on Sunday. The students will then have one day to see local sites with their new PKU friends.
“The cross-cultural capstone is an exceptional opportunity for some of our brightest undergraduates to work with students abroad,” said Professor Kamran Behdinan (MIE), NSERC Chair in Multidisciplinary Engineering Design and coordinator of international capstone design projects.
The PKU students will have an opportunity to visit Toronto when they participate in final project presentations during the MIE Capstone Design Showcase in April.
Invisibility cloaking is no longer the stuff of science fiction: two researchers in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering have demonstrated an effective invisibility cloak that is thin, scalable and adaptive to different types and sizes of objects.
Professor George Eleftheriades (ECE) and PhD student Michael Selvanayagam have designed and tested a new approach to cloaking – by surrounding an object with small antennae that collectively radiate an electromagnetic field. The radiated field cancels out any waves scattering off the cloaked object. Their paper ‘Experimental demonstration of active electromagnetic cloaking’ appears today in the journal Physical Review X.
“We’ve taken an electrical engineering approach, but that’s what we are excited about,” said Eleftheriades. “It’s very practical.”
Picture a mailbox sitting on the street. When light hits the mailbox and bounces back into your eyes, you see the mailbox. When radio waves hit the mailbox and bounce back to your radar detector, you detect the mailbox. Eleftheriades and Selvanayagam’s system wraps the mailbox in a layer of tiny antennae that radiate a field away from the box, cancelling out any waves that would bounce back. In this way, the mailbox becomes undetectable to radar.
“We’ve demonstrated a different way of doing it,” said Eleftheriades. “It’s very simple: instead of surrounding what you’re trying to cloak with a thick metamaterial shell, we surround it with one layer of tiny antennae, and this layer radiates back a field that cancels the reflections from the object.”
Their experimental demonstration effectively cloaked a metal cylinder from radio waves using one layer of loop antennae. The system can be scaled up to cloak larger objects using more loops, and Eleftheriades says the loops could become printed and flat, like a blanket or skin. Currently the antenna loops must be manually attuned to the electromagnetic frequency they need to cancel, but in future they could function both as sensors and active antennae, adjusting to different waves in real time, much like the technology behind noise-cancelling headphones.
Work on developing a functional invisibility cloak began around 2006, but early systems were necessarily large and clunky – if you wanted to cloak a car, for example, in practice you would have to completely envelop the vehicle in many layers of metamaterials in order to effectively ‘shield’ it from electromagnetic radiation. The sheer size and inflexibility of the approach makes it impractical for real-world uses. Earlier attempts to make thin cloaks were not adaptive and active, and could work only for specific small objects.
Beyond obvious applications, such as hiding military vehicles or conducting surveillance operations, this cloaking technology could eliminate obstacles – for example, structures interrupting signals from cellular base stations could be cloaked to allow signals to pass by freely. The system can also alter the signature of a cloaked object, making it appear bigger, smaller, or even shifting it in space. And though their tests showed the cloaking system works with radio waves, re-tuning it to work with Terahertz (T-rays) or light waves could use the same principle as the necessary antenna technology matures.
“There are more applications for radio than for light,” said Eleftheriades. “It’s just a matter of technology – you can use the same principle for light, and the corresponding antenna technology is a very hot area of research.”
From creating an R&D roadmap for aircraft interiors, to applying the Rapid Application Development (RAD) methodology within a luxury brand retailer, 25 students had the opportunity to tackle diverse industry topics during the second year of project-based learning with the University of Toronto Institute for Multidisciplinary Design & Innovation (UT-IMDI).
October 28 marked an evening of celebration for the Institute which officially launched a year ago.
During UT-IMDI’s first year, nine undergraduate students landed exclusive aerospace projects, completing their design projects over the summer months, under the supervision of a senior engineer and a faculty member.
This year, UT-IMDI welcomed nine new industry partners, from automotive to retail, in addition to nearly tripling the number of student project offerings.
The opportunity to work within industry has been invaluable for many UT-IMDI students.
UT-IMDI alumna, Jaclyn Canton (EngSci 1T3) worked consecutive summer projects with Bombardier Aerospace, participating this year in projects related to the CSeries aircraft.
“I had the opportunity to work in a business environment where I was able to learn new skills and interact with other teams within the department,” said Canton. “The experience I gained, coupled with invaluable advice from my mentors, inspired me to pursue what I was most passionate about, push my boundaries and take advantage of every opportunity to challenge myself.”
Canton is now a full-time Bombardier employee in the Liaison Engineering Department, assigned to the Global Express Program.
“The exposure gained, even in the short duration of the summer months, is an exceptional opportunity for U of T Engineering students to interact with industry and deliver a completed design project,” said Professor Kamran Behdinan (MIE), the Institute’s Director. “With the support of the UT-IMDI advisory board, our projects are developed collaboratively, to benefit both our students and the real needs of industry today.”
Over the next five years, the Institute plans to expand to 70 summer projects annually. Students in all engineering disciplines can apply, based on the project needs, through a competitive interview process.
Applications for the forthcoming summer will open in early 2014. For more information, contact imdi@mie.utoronto.ca.
If you see faculty, staff and students sporting blue moustaches, it’s because they are supporting Blue Movember, a campaign designed to help raise awareness of mental health.
It is a variation on Movember, an annual event in which men grow moustaches during the month to raise awareness around men’s health issues, especially cancer. Blue Movember is a partnership between Movember and U of T’s Community Health Office Blue Space, but its focus is to encourage students to talk about mental health and well-being, according to one of the organizers, Lesley Mak, Assistant Director, Student Experience & Teaching Development.
As with Movember, faculty, staff and students are encouraged to grow moustaches throughout the month, an activity that encourages conversation about why people are doing this.
Mak noted that while the “student body is 75 per cent male, only 60 per cent of engineering students using our embedded counsellors are male.” The statistics come from the U of T Engineering Registrar’s Office and appointment data over the past three years.
This year’s campaign was launched Nov. 1 in The Pit in the Sandford Fleming Building with an event where faculty, staff and students were invited to have blue moustaches painted on – with washable make-up, of course.
Senior Lecturer Jason Bazylak (MIE) is planning to grow a moustache throughout the month, but got a head start by having a blue one painted on. He was accompanied by his two-and-a-half-year-old son Frankie, who also sported a blue moustache.
“I want to help raise awareness about men’s health issues,” Bazylak said. He has participated in previous campaigns, triggered in part by the fact his father died from cancer a few years ago.
“One of the big issues is men often aren’t aware of various health issues, including mental health, and they may be hesitant to speak about it,” he said. This sort of initiative helps get people talking, and mental health is an important one to address.
And, moustaches aren’t just for men. Professor Susan McCahan (MIE), Vice-Dean, Undergraduate, is participating – by having a blue moustache Photoshopped onto her face. The image is being used on posters to help promote the Blue Movember campaign at U of T Engineering.
Professor Beno Benhabib (MIE) is participating in Movember again this year. He has challenged the Faculty to raise $15,000 to shave off his moustache. This is not without precedent; three years ago, he challenged everyone to raise $10,000 to shave off his moustache for the first time in 25 years.
To find out more, see the Engineering team’s Movember webpage.
To support Jason Bazylak and his team, visit their Movember webpage.
For more photos from the Blue Movember launch, visit the Facebook gallery.
Professor Chris Kennedy
In a commentary published in the Oct. 30th edition of the journal Nature, Civil Engineering Professor Chris Kennedy (CivE) and colleagues warn garbage is being generated faster than other environmental pollutants, including greenhouse gases.
The researchers say that ‘business-as-usual’ projections, based on population growth and gross domestic product (GDP), will see us generate more than six million tonnes of solid-waste a day by 2025. That’s enough to fill a line of garbage trucks 5,000 kilometres long every day.
“This means greater numbers of people having to live in environments that are degraded due to the effects of trash,” said Kennedy.
Kennedy wrote the commentary along with lead author Daniel Hoornweg, associate professor of energy systems at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa and Perinaz Bhada-Tata, a solid-waste consultant in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
“Waste doesn’t get on the map in terms of threats to our planetary system in the way greenhouse gases and ozone do,” said Kennedy.
But the problem isn’t just the waste itself, he added, but also the energy and resources required to make the products we throw out.
And as he and his co-authors point out, population is the main reason we generate so much waste. In 1900, the world had 220 million urban residents and produced fewer than 300,000 tonnes of solid waste (such as broken household items, ash, food waste and packaging) per day.
By 2000, the 2.9 billion people living in cities were creating more than three million tonnes of solid waste every day.
The researchers also found that some countries generate more waste than others. Japan for example produces roughly one-third less garbage per person than the United States. This is despite the fact they have approximately the same GDP per capita.
The reason, the authors say, is Japan’s higher-density living, higher prices for a larger share of imports and cultural norms.
According to Kennedy, we need to act on two fronts – population growth and waste management – if we hope to curb our garbage production.
“Population is the ultimate driver here, and vulnerable, poor people tend to multiply faster,” he said. “So anything you can do to help urban poor, to give them more security, health and education, will stop the global population from growing so high.”
To better manage wastes, society needs to accelerate the adoption of practices of ‘industrial ecology’ – developing urban and industrial systems that conserve mass akin to natural ecosystems. A great example is the city of Kawaski in Japan, where firms are linked into an industrial ecosystem.
‘Peak trash’ – the year when garbage production is expected to reach a maximum – depends on how well we learn to curb our waste.
Kennedy and his co-authors write that richer North American and European cities could see peak trash by 2050 and Asia-Pacific countries by 2075. But they say waste will continue to rise in the fast-growing cities of sub-Saharan Africa.
“The urbanization trajectory of Africa will be the main determinant of the date and intensity of global peak waste,” they write.
“With lower populations, denser, more resource-efficient cities and less consumption (along with higher affluence), the peak could come forward to 2075 and reduce in intensity by more than 25 per cent. This would save around 2.6 million tonnes per day.”
The design for U of T’s new Centre for Engineering Innovation & Entrepreneurship (CEIE) was unveiled on Oct. 29.
The landmark CEIE is targeted for opening in late 2016 on the St. George Campus, adjacent to Convocation Hall.
As the conceptual plan shows, the building will move beyond the traditional lecture hall and classroom with unique collaborative learning and hands-on design spaces. These spaces will allow for a variety of configurations to promote dynamic group work as well as formal teacher-student presentations.
The building also features dedicated space for alumni and industry partners to meet with students and collaborate with faculty while at U of T.
“It will, quite simply, provide the environment to nurture the innovator and the creator inside our students and prepare them to lead on a global level,” said Cristina Amon, Dean, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering.
“The CEIE brings together the talents of the entire Faculty and the broader University to create the next solutions in Engineering. It provides the space, facilities and collaborative environment to encourage students, researchers, alumni and industry partners to work together to get great ideas off the ground.”
The schematic design from Montgomery Sisam Architects of Toronto and U.K.-based Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios includes the Lee & Margaret Lau Auditorium, a 468-seat interactive space meant to optimize audience engagement.
Schematic design of the Centre for Engineering Innovation & Entrepreneurship. Final design is being developed in consultation with the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, the University of Toronto, the City of Toronto and their respective representatives.
Image courtesy of Montgomery Sisam Architects + Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios.
The CEIE plans also incorporate smart building concepts, which integrates heating, cooling, electrical and communications systems into a single network, providing greater energy efficiency.
A $1-million commitment from the Engineering Society is earmarked for a unique space on the lower level where student club members can socialize, hold events and collaborate on group projects. The Society’s contribution demonstrates undergraduates’ recognition of the importance of this new student space.
“The building will encourage innovative collaboration by bringing together research and educational centres and institutes within a single building that address many of the emerging initiatives within the Faculty,” said Professor Emeritus Ron Venter (MIE), who leads the building’s planning committee.
“These include sustainable energy, infrastructure, water, robotics, design and advanced manufacturing, global engineering opportunities and leadership in technical and social innovation.”
U of T Engineering’s Entrepreneurship Hatchery, for example, will have a home in the new building. The Hatchery fosters undergraduates’ entrepreneurial ventures with the help of mentors, venture capitalists and other professionals.
The University of Toronto Institute for Sustainable Energy will also be housed at the CEIE. The Institute is an inclusive, multidisciplinary initiative designed to bring together researchers, students, and teachers from across the University, together with partners from industry and government. Its goal is to increase energy efficiency and reduce the environmental impact of energy use and conversion.
“The building will help foster the best in entrepreneurial engineering,” said George Myhal (IndE 7T8), Chair of Engineering’s Campaign Executive Committee – whose $5 million gift was among the first in support of the building. “We will see many innovative and exciting solutions emerge from this building,” he added.
Donations announced on Oct. 29 at the design unveiling include significant gifts totalling over $10 million from the Engineering Society, Lee (ElecE 7T7, MEng 8T2) & Margaret Lau, and an anonymous donor.
These donations build on the momentum of previously-announced gifts from Bill (ChemE 6T7) and Kathleen Troost, whose donation will provide space for the Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (ILead); Peter (CivE 6T2) and Jocelyn Allen, and Paul Cadario (CivE 7T3), whose contribution to the Centre for Global Engineering (CGEN) includes support for CGEN in CEIE. The U of T Engineering community has so far secured more than $50 million toward the building.
Skulematters presents a series of detailed features about the Centre for Engineering Innovation & Entrepreneurship (CEIE). Find out why the CEIE will inspire a collaborative spirit and entrepreneurship by taking a look at this issue: