There is no planet B. Climate change, pollution and environmental degradation are among the most complex global challenges of our time.

U of T Engineering researchers are world leaders in developing new ways of generating and storing energy — techniques that lower or even eliminate emissions. They are also pursuing efforts to design smarter cities by more accurately accounting for the environmental impacts of large infrastructure, and by quantifying the effects of behavioural changes around cycling, public transit, and freight transportation. Together with our industry partners, we are building a cleaner, greener world.

Out of thin air

Rising global CO2 emissions have produced a climate crisis. But what if there was a way to capture emissions before they reach the atmosphere — or better yet, extract the carbon that is already there — and turn it into commercially valuable products?

“There are several established chemical pathways for capturing carbon and converting it into fuels or plastic precursors,” says electrical and computer engineering professor Ted Sargent, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology and serves as U of T’s vice-president, research and innovation and strategic initiatives. “The challenge is that they are energy- intensive. Our work focuses on ways to lower this energy cost.”

In the past year, Sargent and his team have published several major papers on the use of electrolyzers — devices that use electricity to drive a chemical reaction — to recover value from waste carbon.

With international collaborators, the team has developed highly efficient electrochemical processes for converting CO2 into ethylene, one of the world’s most widely produced chemicals. They have also used electrolyzers to upgrade ethylene to ethylene oxide, the next step in several complex chemical value chains that eventually end with products such as polyester fabrics and plastic drink bottles.

Shifting delivery times for faster, cleaner transportation

Delivering goods in a busy city has always been a challenge, but today the pressure is higher than ever before.

“It’s the Amazon effect,” says civil engineering professor Matt Roorda, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Freight Transportation and Logistics. “People are buying things online and expect them delivered within a day or even within a few hours.”

Roorda is the lead U of T Engineering researcher on the Smart Freight Centre (SFC), a collaborative network whose partners include McMaster University, York University and the Region of Peel.

Last summer, SFC conducted a pilot study in which industry partners Walmart, Loblaws and LCBO stores shifted key deliveries from daytime hours to the early morning (before 7 a.m.) and late evening (between 7 and 11 p.m.). Roorda and his team found that the shift increased the average speed of trucks by 18%, with associated reductions in key air pollutants of between 10% and 15%.

“There definitely seems to be a lot of spare capacity on our roadways at certain times of day,” says Roorda. “Our pilot study suggests that taking advantage of this could have tangible benefits, both economically and for the environment.”

Why don’t more Torontonians cycle to work?

A study led by civil engineering postdoctoral fellow Ahmadreza Imani and professors Shoshanna Saxe and Eric Miller classified nearly every section of road and intersection in Toronto on a scale of one to four by its level of traffic stress, or LTS.

The team found that across most of the city, cyclists cannot travel for more than about eight minutes before hitting a section with an LTS of more than two. If the disjointed nature of Toronto’s cycling infrastructure could be improved, the researchers estimate that the number of citizens cycling to work would rise significantly. The results: improved sustainability and public health.

The rise of deep learning and machine intelligence are driving us to re-imagine almost every sector of our society, from finance to human health to transportation. Big data helps us see patterns, identify bottlenecks and design more efficient systems.

Through hubs such as our Centre for Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Engineering (CARTE), U of T Engineering researchers are working with a range of partners to design new algorithms that can enable autonomous vehicles to navigate safely, improve the delivery of health care and much more.

Can self-driving cars handle a Canadian winter?

A new dataset created by U of T Engineering, the University of Waterloo and Scale AI will help train future self-driving cars to handle the challenges of winter driving.

“Existing datasets were collected on sunny, summer days,” says aerospace engineering professor Steven Waslander. “If you take algorithms trained on those datasets and try to use them in adverse conditions, they tend to get confused.”

In collaboration with Professor Krzysztof Czarnecki (University of Waterloo), Waslander and his team used the Autonomoose — a Lincoln MKZ vehicle equipped with sensors — to record data from more than 1,000 kilometres of driving around southeastern Ontario. Of this, approximately 33 kilometres in harsh, snowy conditions were selected to form the basis of the dataset.

The team partnered with Scale AI, a San Francisco-based AI infrastructure company, to label the data and have made the results available for free to researchers. Waslander and his team also plan to use the dataset in their own work.

“We hope that the techniques we develop to locate and track objects in adverse weather will eventually be incorporated into future autonomous vehicle software packages around the world, making them safer for everyone,” he says.

An artificial intelligence innovation HQ in Toronto

For artificial intelligence researchers at U of T, starting a new industry collaboration is as simple as crossing the street.

The LG Toronto AI Lab was created in the summer of 2018. Since then, it has catalyzed more than a dozen collaborations between employees of the company and U of T researchers in both engineering and computer science. Applications include the use of visual cameras for object detection and 3D perception, as well as data- driven protection.

Through ‘reverse internships,’ LG staff scientists spend up to four months working in academic research labs, returning to the company better equipped to tackle challenging problems. Researchers from LG’s labs in Korea also have the option to complete a ‘mini master’s degree’ by working alongside U of T Engineering professors to refine their skills and completing a capstone project.

Ontario is one of North America’s manufacturing hubs, and Toronto lies at the heart of this critical network. New materials and manufacturing methods are key to ensuring that the manufacturing sector remains competitive for decades to come.

UofT Engineering innovation can enhance logistics, improve quality and accelerate development of the next generation of products, businesses and industries.

Graphene doesn’t crack under pressure

Graphene is a paradox: it is the thinnest material known to science, yet also one of the strongest. Now, research from U of T Engineering shows that graphene is also highly resistant to mechanical fatigue.

The team — including mechanical engineering PhD candidate Teng Cui, mechanical engineering professors Tobin Filleter and Yu Sun (Canada Research Chair in Micro and Nano Engineering Systems), materials engineering professor Chandra Veer Singh and collaborators at Rice University — combined computer simulations with physical experiments. In the lab, they stretched a sheet of graphene over holes only a few micrometres in diameter, like the head of a tiny drum.

Using an atomic force microscope, they applied anywhere from 20 to 85% of the force that would break the material. “Even at 70% of the maximum stress, the graphene didn’t break for over a billion cycles,” says Cui.

Graphene-containing composites are already finding their way into sports equipment such as tennis rackets and skis, and in the future may be used in cars or in aircraft.

“Until now, nobody had measured the fatigue behaviour of the underlying material,” says Filleter. “Now that we have that, we should be able to design composites that work even better.”

Tiny features, big challenges

For nearly 30 years, a partnership between Hitachi High-Technologies Canada (HHTC) and U of T Engineering has enabled advanced analysis of a wide range of samples — everything from volcanic glass from the bottom of the ocean to rocks that the Apollo astronauts brought back from the moon.

HHTC designs and deploys electron microscopes, and some of their most advanced equipment is at the Ontario Centre for the Characterisation of Advanced Materials (OCCAM). This interdisciplinary research centre, co-located in the Departments of Material Science & Engineering and Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry, is built around state-of-the-art electron microscopy and surface characterization tools.

Involving both equipment and personnel, the partnership enables HHTC to draw on the practical challenges that users are trying to address to catalyze the development of new microscopy technologies. OCCAM is the first place that these technologies are deployed, and the two-way partnership continuously yields new protocols and procedures. By remaining at the forefront of electron microscopy, OCCAM enables its users — from across U of T Engineering and beyond — to gain insight into the natural world and design better devices, from dental implants to microchips, solar cells, aircraft and much more.

“Many people don’t know it, but some of the most advanced instrumentation for analyzing materials are developed right here in Toronto,” says Professor Jane Howe, who worked at HHTC for more than 10 years before joining U of T Engineering’s departments of materials engineering and chemical engineering in 2018. “In large part, that is due to close collaborations between exceptional researchers and partners in industry.”

All water on Earth is part of the same cycle — and every drop matters. Yet around the world, water supply and quality are under increasing pressure from growing populations, industrial development and climate change.

U of T Engineering researchers are working together to break down chemical contaminants, develop low-cost solutions for sanitation and design more natural water management structures for cities. Together with our partners, we are ensuring a safe, accessible water supply for generations to come.

Why some cities turn off the taps at night

For more than a billion people around the world, running water is supplied by intermittent systems that turn on and off at various times of the week. Civil engineering professor David Taylor studies the design and function of intermittent systems — and how they fit into the global challenge of meeting international targets for human development and safe drinking water.

“These systems are chaotic,” says Taylor. “There are often pipes or valves that are missing from the official charts. We usually don’t know as much as we think we do.”

Rather than use complex hydraulic models typical of the industry, Taylor has developed a single equation that describes how a system behaves when consumers are satisfied versus when they are not.

In the unsatisfied case, turning off the pipes may save water, but it does so by leaving customers thirsty. In the satisfied case, demand tapers off and other effects, such as leakage, come to dominate the system, so turning off the pipes may cause more trouble than it’s worth.

“Without a way to decide which intermittent systems count as ‘safe,’ we don’t stand a chance of hitting our 2030 global goals for access to clean and affordable water,” he adds. “The model can help guide us as we start to make the major infrastructure investments needed.”

Pollution-eating microbes are ready for action

Chemical engineering professor Elizabeth Edwards, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Anaerobic Biotechnology, has spent years developing a potent mix of microbes that can break down toxic chemicals. Now, through spinoff company SiREM, she and her team are preparing to put them to work for the first time.

The bacterial cultures are designed to treat a set of contaminants known as BTEX — benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene — found in soil and groundwater where crude oil and its products have been used. Selected from natural organisms found at contaminated sites, the cultures are able to survive without oxygen, enabling them to be injected into deep aquifers.

The collaboration has a track record of success. Edwards and SiREM previously commercialized a culture known as KB-1, which was designed to break down chlorinated solvents widely used in dry cleaning and degreasing. If the new cultures are as successful, SiREM plans to add them to their arsenal to increase their share of the multi-billion-dollar global market for biological treatment of contaminants.

Doctors and medical researchers work closely with engineers to design better ways of diagnosing and treating disease. These partnerships enable us to cure what was previously incurable, extending and enhancing human lives around the world.

U of T Engineering innovations range from algorithms that point toward promising drug candidates to lab-grown tissues and organs that could one day be re-implanted back into humans to repair damage. They also include simple, low-cost diagnostic tools that reduce the need for complex lab equipment, especially in remote locations.

Smarter MRI scans for diagnosis and treatment

As stem-cell technology improves, researchers hope to one day repair damaged tissues and organs by implanting lab-grown replacements. Today, however, most implanted cells die, and a great deal of research focuses on what can be done to successfully integrate them into the body.

Biomedical engineering professor Hai-Ling Margaret Cheng and her team can help. They are developing substances that could enable the progress of implants to be tracked by non-invasive methods, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

“Prior to an MRI session, patients may need to intake a contrast agent, a substance that makes certain tissues or organs easier to see in the scan,” says Cheng. “If we could incorporate contrast agents directly into implanted tissues and scaffolds, we could non-invasively track their progress over time.”

Traditional contrast agents are designed to last only a few hours, and many of them cause side effects. Cheng’s approach of leaving them in the body for months on end would require re-designing these substances from the ground up, but the team is up to the challenge.

“As a patient, the last thing you want is to have an implant, and then have a highly invasive surgery a couple of months down the line to check whether the cells are still there,” she says. “If we can provide an alternative, it could be a game-changer for everyone who’s involved in regenerative medicine.”

Using genome-aware AI to discover new drugs

Most new drugs fail. U of T Engineering spinoff company Deep Genomics aims to change that.

Deep Genomics was created in 2015 and based on the work of electrical and computer engineering professor Brendan Frey, who holds The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Chair in Engineering and the Canada Research Chair in Information Processing and Machine Learning. It is the only company

to combine more than a decade of world-leading expertise in both deep learning and genome biology.

The company’s proprietary algorithms crawl through reams of data on the many genetic mutations that can cause disease, and make predictions about the properties of potential therapeutic molecules. Their AI is then used to design new compounds that are therapeutic candidates.

In the fall of 2019, Deep Genomics announced the first-ever therapeutic candidate discovered using artificial intelligence. The candidate has the potential to treat Wilson disease, a rare genetic disorder that causes an accumulation of copper in vital organs, and can be fatal if left untreated.

“Our vision is to develop genetic medicines more rapidly and more accurately than was previously possible,” says Frey.