News and Events

A team of University of Windsor students is proposing a more reliable and cost-effective way to monitor contamination in Lake Erie.

Comprised of engineering and law students, the group has entered its idea in Erie Hack— a competition created by the Cleveland Water Alliance and the Creativity and Innovation Team at NASA Glenn Research Center in hopes of accelerating technology solutions to the lake’s most pressing problems.

One of these problems is hazardous algal blooms primarily caused by agricultural runoff. These blooms release harmful toxins, which result in loss of plant and fish life and increase water treatment costs. Monitoring these blooms is a critical part of the mitigation process, says environmental engineering PhD student Mohammad Madani.

How does a building manager decide which energy retrofit is the most economical and least impactful on occupants and the environment?

Rania Toufeili has the answer. A master’s student of environmental engineering, she has designed an asset management decision support tool that can assist building managers in selecting the preferred technically feasible energy retrofit. The support tool landed her second place at the Canadian Network of Asset Managers student research symposium held May 6 to 9 in Kelowna, B.C.

“Building energy retrofits are a very effective way to decrease the energy consumption of a building and in turn decrease global greenhouse gas emissions,” Toufeili says.

Her tool combines multi-criteria decision making with life cycle thinking to develop a more comprehensive and expansive retrofit evaluation method than others on the market. The evaluation considers the energy retrofit’s environmental, economic, social, and technical performance by using a set of relevant key performance indicators.

Toufeili was selected from approximately 30 student applicants and nine student symposium presenters studying topics connected to asset management.

A University of Windsor engineering professor is helping students grasp more than complex electrical engineering concepts.

Shervin Erfani has made a six-figure dollar donation to the Faculty of Engineering to help students finance their education and foster collaboration in the classroom.

“The greatest reward I have ever been given is the simple opportunity to teach generations of young people how to think in an ‘engineering way’ about the world around them,” Dr. Erfani said at a gathering of his immediate family and colleagues, Friday in the Ed Lumley Centre for Engineering Innovation.

There, Dean of Engineering Mehrdad Saif unveiled the newly-named Dr. Shervin Erfani Learning Studio and recognized Erfani’s philanthropic investments to endow two scholarships in memory of his father Dr. Ibrahim Erfani. The scholarships will support undergraduate and graduate engineering students and are set to begin disbursing in 2020.

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Fourth-year industrial engineering students at the University of Windsor are improving the accuracy of critical medical procedures, optimizing automotive production lines and using virtual reality to enhance manufacturing processes.

Students presented these projects and more at the Faculty of Engineering’s annual Industrial Engineering Capstone Design Demo Day on March 29, 2019. Capstone projects challenge fourth-year engineering students to apply the formal knowledge they’ve gained during their undergraduate studies to solve real-world problems. 

Jackie Ing and Stefan Spiric focused on improving mannequins used to train students on perfecting thoracentesis, an invasive procedure that involves inserting a needle into the chest to remove fluid or air.

“It’s a very critical procedure, because if there’s too much force, they can puncture the lung or cause internal bleeding,” Ing says.

Windsor’s Schulich School of Medicine uses a medical training mannequin that has one silicone tissue layer. Ing says their model, created by graduate student Andre Khayat, has two silicone layers, which is more similar to human skin and muscle layers.

Using cadavers, the two collected data while performing the procedure and recorded the needle’s peak force, impulse force and pulsewidth. They then created a series of silicone trials to try and match the data.