Researchers awarded BC Knowledge Development funding

Researchers awarded BC Knowledge Development funding

August 23, 2021

Two projects lead by faculty from the Department of Mechanical Engineering have been awarded funding from the BC Knowledge Development Fund. The main investment in research infrastructure offered by the Province, “the BCKDF is pivotal to the development of vital research infrastructure, allowing institutions to attract a critical mass of researchers, skilled technicians, and research users.”

Investigating the neurophysiological effects and accumulation of subconcussive sports head impacts

Principal Investigator: Dr. Lyndia Wu

This project investigates the effects of mild head impact and impact accumulation on brain activity, as these can contribute to brain injury even without a concussion. The knowledge gained in this study will contribute to the health of players involved in contact and collision sports, especially children and youth.

Rapid Air Improvement Network (RAIN)
Principal Investigators: Dr. Steven Rogak, Dr. Naomi Zimmerman
Co-investigators: Dr. Amanda Giang, Dr. Patrick Kirchen and Dr. Adam Rysanek, as well as faculty from Chemistry, Geography, Medicine, and the School of Population and Public Health.

RAIN integrates engineering, architecture, policy and air pollution science to study the health and climate impacts of air emissions in BC. The project will develop and test mitigation measures for emissions, which can then be applied beyond the campus.

Both projects have received funding for infrastructure that will support their research goals and contribute to expanding research capabilities at UBC’s Vancouver campus, as well as create health, economic, and environmental benefits for the province.

High-speed bearingless motors research receives Canada Foundation for Innovation infrastructure funding

August 12, 2021

Dr. Minkyun Noh has received funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation John R. Evans Leaders Fund for his project Control and Instrumentation Infrastructure for High-speed Bearingless Motors Research.

Capstone design wins 2021 ASHRAE competition

August 9, 2021

A UBC Mechanical Engineering Capstone design team has won first place in the HVAC Design Calculations category of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) 2021 design competition. Usually, Capstone students are paired with an industry-sponsored project for the final design work of their undergraduate degree. Instead, Brandon Jung, Arin Lee, Lukengo Miguel, Kyle Vanderhorst and Jeff Yoon decided to complete this year’s ASHRAE HVAC Design Calculations challenge, designing a heating, ventilation and air conditioning system for a 50,000 square foot building in Prince George, British Columbia.

ASHRAE’s HVAC Design Calculations category challenged students to calculate the heating and cooling loads for the building and create an energy efficient HVAC system design, while complying with industry standards. Competitors were given a set of project requirements, utility and service information, climate information and architectural drawings. They were challenged to fulfill requirements specific to the building, which contained a post-secondary cafeteria facility capable of serving 3,000 students a day. Designs had to account for both safe food storage and diners’ comfort, as well as achieve the goals of low life cycle cost, low environmental impact, comfort and health, creative high-performance green design, and synergy with the architecture.

Computer model of competition building

Computer model of competition building.

 

The UBC team made a computer model of the building in order to analyze the implications of the building’s orientation, underground wall surface area and thermal zones. The model allowed them to understand how building’s position relative to the sun would change its temperature throughout the day, including how geometric qualities and physical details like exterior walls and window area would affect heat loss.

Required to submit their final design as a PDF report, the team had to provide mechanical floor plans of their design and chosen equipment, a schematic flow diagram, as well as heating and cooling load calculations. They also had to illustrate how their understanding of the building’s shape, layout, and material properties worked with their equipment choices to comply with ASHRAE Standards for occupant’s comfort and air quality. As part of their capstone course and the competition, the students worked under the guidance of faculty advisor Dr. Nima Atabaki, P.Eng., as well as industry advisors and UBC Mechanical Engineering alumni Esteban Kello, P.Eng. and Sun Jun Yoo, EIT. The capstone team’s winning design can be seen in their final presentation as part of UBC’s virtual 2021 Design and Innovation Day.

ASHRAE will officially present the award to a member of the team at their 2022 winter conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. The team wins a prize of $2000, as well as travel and transportation for one representative at the conference.

This is the fifth time a UBC team has won the Design Calculation category of the competition. The 2022 ASHRAE Design Competition is now open, and challenges students to design heating and cooling systems for a building in Sydney, Australia. Students interested in HVAC can also learn more about ASHRAE though the UBC ASHRAE Student Chapter.

UBC Thunderbots take top spot at international robot soccer competition

July 22, 2021

The UBC Thunderbots have placed first in their division at the RoboCup, an annual robot soccer competition for university students around the world.

It is the UBC design team’s second RoboCup victory in a row, having topped the same event category — the Lower Tournament of RoboCup’s Small Size League — in 2019. (The 2020 competition was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.)

“Despite the challenges of the past year, including not being able to meet in person since March of 2020, we were fortunate to achieve another win,” says Chantal Sousa, a fourth-year integrated engineering student and the team captain. “I’m so pleased with what we’ve accomplished, and grateful to be able to participate in this wonderful competition again.”

Doctoral Student wins Prestigious Vanier Scholarship

July 21, 2021

Vanier Scholar Rivkah Gardner-Frolick

Mechanical Engineering PhD student Rivkah Gardner-Frolick has won one of Canada’s top scholarships, the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. This scholarship awards selected students across the country $50,000 per year for three years of doctoral studies, and is based off the students’ academic excellence, research potential and leadership. The award was created to “attract and retain world-class doctoral students and establish Canada as a global centre of excellence in research and higher learning.”

As a new Vanier Scholar, Gardner-Frolick will be researching industrial air pollution, and how air quality modelling can inform policy making and the pursuit of environmental justice – identifying where and how air pollution disproportionally affects members of disadvantaged groups by looking at environmental data alongside community demographic information like race, income, and education. Her project will develop tools that can be leveraged to expand knowledge of how Canadian communities are affected by air pollution, involving an analysis of industrial facilities across the country, a regional study, and a local citizen scientist project that aims to include affected communities in environmental justice research.

As part of the Lab for Environmental Assessment and Policy, she is jointly supervised by Assistant Professor Amanda Giang from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) and Dr. David Boyd, Associate Professor with IRES. Dr. Giang’s research work is at the nexus of air quality science and policy development, applying engineering tools like simulation, statistical and qualitative methods to further our understanding of the impact of technology on health and the environment.  Dr. Boyd is an international expert on environmental law and policy, and is a United Nations Special Rapporteur human rights and the environment.

As a leader seeking to empower others, Gardner-Frolick has mentored undergraduate and graduate students at her former alma maters and UBC, volunteered as a Team Lead for NGO Engineers Without Borders for a water distribution project in Nicaragua, and currently serves on the executive committee of the Mechanical Engineering Graduate Association (MEGA). She is also the graduate student representative on the Department of Mechanical Engineering Sustainability Committee.

Prior to winning the Vanier Scholarship, Gardner-Frolick has been awarded UBC’s Four Year Fellowship, the Martha Salcudean Memorial Award in Mechanical Engineering, and the BC Air Quality Robert Caton Scholarship.

 

Media Mention: Dr. Naomi Zimmerman on the poor air quality of wildfire season and how to stay safe

July 13, 2021

CBC: As more than 200 wildfires continue to burn in British Columbia, experts are advising residents to start preparing for wildfire smoke and poor air quality.

Air quality warnings are already in place for most of B.C.’s southern Interior, and fire risk in the province is very high.

The warnings come after a record-breaking heat wave elevated the wildfire risks far beyond normal for most of Western Canada.

Naomi Zimmerman, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of B.C., says residents shouldn’t wait for an air quality warning to start getting prepared for smoky skies.

Media Mention: Dr. Walter Mérida on standards for renewable cities

July 12, 2021

VANCOUVER SUN: As much of the world switches over to electric transportation, the “What about this?” and “What about that?” questions are popping up from those people who are saying, “Not possible.” On the other side of that discussion is UBC Prof. Walter Mérida, who prefers to ask “What if?”, as in: “What if there was a way to integrate all of our disparate urban infrastructure systems to create a cohesive, comprehensive, and connected platform — driven by low or no-carbon technologies?”

Top Finish for UBC AeroDesign at the 2021 SAE Aero Design Knowledge Competition

June 30, 2021

Render of Wailord (left), Mantine and Remoraids (right)

 

Amid a challenging design year affected by pandemic restrictions, globally displaced members, and another virtual academic session, UBC AeroDesign has once again demonstrated its resiliency and technical aptitude at the 2021 SAE Aero Design Knowledge competition held earlier this March. For competition, the team designed two aircraft which were submitted through technical design reports and presentations.

UBC AeroDesign received the following results:

  • Regular Class: 1st place design, 5th place presentation
  • Advanced Class: 9th place design, 2nd place presentation

Led by team captain and Mechanical Engineering undergraduate Phoebe Cheung, the over fifty member team pursued two unique designs:

Wailord, the 2021 Regular Class aircraft, featured a 120-inch span low-wing configuration and was subjected to a 100-foot runway limitation and 1000 watt power restriction. The goal was to minimize empty aircraft weight while maximizing payload capacity. Wailord was designed to carry two soccer balls and 18.3 lbs. of static payload.

Mantine, the 2021 Advanced Class aircraft, incorporated a blended-wing body and was subjected to a lower power restriction of 750 watts, but was permitted to use fibre-reinforced composite material. The mission was to simulate the colonization of Mars. With a 132-inch wing span, Mantine was designed to release payload mid-flight (in the form of Nerf Howler balls and water bottles) and colonists (represented by ping-pong balls). The ping pong balls would be transported to the ground in the team’s 2021 flying-wing autonomous glider, Remoraid, which releases from the main aircraft during flight.

At the SAE Aero Design Knowledge Competition, the Regular Class technical presentation was delivered by Mechanical Engineering student Vincent Liu and Civil Engineering student Marco Leung, while the Advanced Class presentation was given by Cheung and Engineering Physics student Sean Lan.

The aircraft were designed with manufacturability in mind, in order to apply the team’s ideas to a physical prototype when they are able to do in-person work in upcoming seasons.

UBC AeroDesign’s work was made possible by support from their 2020-21 sponsors, including the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Faculty of Applied Science, as well as the guidance of their faculty advisor Dr. Carl Ollivier-Gooch.

How to beat the heat — indoors and out

June 29, 2021

Mechanical Engineering associate faculty member Dr. Adam Rysanek shares some tips on how to beat the heat.  |

Staying cool and safe in the heat may be challenging over the next few days. Here, two UBC experts share some tips and practices for warm weather safety. Dr. Sarah Henderson is an associate professor of population and public health at UBC, and the scientific director of environmental health at the BC Centre for Disease Control. She researches the impacts of air pollution and extreme weather events. Dr. Adam Rysanek is an assistant professor of environmental systems at UBC, and a healthy buildings expert who is working on alternative means of cooling indoor and outdoor spaces without relying on traditional air conditioning.

New paper solves the soft solid puncture problem

June 24, 2021

When Assistant Professor Mattia Bacca is trying to figure out a mechanical engineering problem, he inquires into how the natural world has already solved it. Bioinspired engineering is an approach that examines abilities plants and animals have evolved over millions of years, like the way a gecko can cling to a surface with the pads on its toes, or an ant can cut through a leaf many times its size. Dr. Bacca and PhD candidate Stefano Fregonese have recently published a paper answering the previously unsolved question of how the mechanics of piercing works on soft materials – like skin – by looking at the way nature has approached the issue.

“Cutting is ubiquitous in our survival and daily lives,” Bacca explains. “When we chew food, we cut tissue to make it digestible. Almost every species in the animal kingdom evolved with the ability to cut tissue to feed and defend, hence have acquired remarkable morphological and physical features to allow this process efficiently.”

Despite its long existence in the natural world, the mechanisms involved in cutting soft tissue have only gained attention in engineering over the last several decades, initially with investigations into the properties of rubber. Previous approaches determined the force needed to insert a needle in tissue after its initial puncture, using physical experiments that couldn’t fully measure the deformations and complex failure mechanisms involved in breaking through the surface of a soft material.  Fregonese and Bacca’s research took this inquiry further by creating a mechanical theory that determines the critical force required for needle insertion – the pivotal phenomenon of puncture.  Their work provides a simple semi-analytical model to describe the process, from dimensional arguments and finite element analysis.

Their results come from various inquiries into animal solutions to this problem. At first, Fregonese joined Dr. Bacca’s Micro & Nano Mechanics Lab for a project related to the mechanics of adhesion in animals like geckos. Exploring overlaps with this area and the problem of cutting, they began to investigate fundamentals of cutting and its link to the morphological evolution of animals, with an international collaboration studying leafcutter ants with animal biomechanics expert Dr. David Labonte (Imperial College), and muscle physiology expert Dr. Natalie Holt (Univerisity of California). Collaborating with UBC Okanagan’s Dr. Kevin Golovin and Mechanical Engineering colleague Dr. Gwynn Elfring to research the interaction between ballistics and gels also contributed to their understanding.

Their theoretical model may help engineers developing various applications such as protective equipment, automation processes involving food, and the emerging technology of robotic surgery. “Piercing soft solids: A mechanical theory for needle insertion,” published in Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmps.2021.104497.

This research was supported by the Department of National Defense of Canada, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and by the Human Frontiers in Science Program.

Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich from Pexels.