The Culinary Research team revealed some of the culinary delights concocted in the brand new Prairie Research Kitchen at Food & Beverage Manitoba’s Industry Excellence Awards on October 9th. In collaboration with RRC’s School of Hospitality and Culinary Arts and Richardson Food & Ingredients, the team created three pies that were donated to a charity auction that raised funds for Cancer Society programs in Manitoba.

The CRI team worked alongside RRC Chef Instructors Gordon Bailey, Kim Cooke, and Lylah Erkau to create the “Pie-O-Dome,” a true piece of art that showcased the skills of the RRC culinary crew. A sugar-crusted almond nougatine pie with organic dark chocolate ganache and Grand Marnier spiked coffee, this showstopper was encased in an airbrushed compressed sugar dome to provide the lucky bidder with an additional delicious (and mysterious!) surprise when shattered. Unsurprisingly, the Pie-O-Dome was a popular item during the auction and was snatched up by a very lucky bidder.

In addition to the Pie-O-Dome, the team whipped up two other pies, including the “Key to Success Lime Pie,” a picture-perfect example of the skills being taught to the next generation of chefs and bakers at RRC’s Culinary Arts and Professional Baking programs. This decadent key lime cheesecake was surrounded by a buttery graham crust and garnished with a pillowy crème Chantilly and fresh sliced limes.

RRC partnered with Richardson Food & Ingredients on the “Co-Pie-Lot Collaboration Pie,” a gluten-free sensation inspired by a classic German Chocolate cake. This partnership pie combined fudgy creamy chocolate filling with a rich and flavourful coconut pecan custard. All this deliciousness rested on a gluten-free oat flour crust made with Richardson gluten-free oats and canola pastry shortening.

Take a look at the creation of the pies in the gallery below:

The Opportunity

SCADA screenshot

Ice formation within aircraft fuel systems has been the subject of research studies, especially in the last decade, with a number of industry-academic projects sourced in the USA and Europe. RRC’s TACAM has engaged in various stages of jet fuel icing research under two project agreements with MDS and EnviroTREC (also representing their OEM partners: Pratt & Whitney and Rolls Royce) since 2013. During the course of these two projects many tasks were performed, such as literature survey; lab-scale experimentation of ice formation in fuel; design, set-up and initiation of a sub-scale fuel rig; integration of water sensor with fuel rig and proDAS system to capture new data. Throughout these investigations, limitations of equipment (instrumentation, physical components of the rig, and computer operating systems) have been identified. With the goal of improving accuracy of test conditions and repeatability of data, work scope of Phase 2 was determined.

Rig set-up

The Approach

The project team’s primary focus was on increased instrumentation, refinement of systems control and improved data acquisition capability. The fuel rig was entirely redesigned to provide consistent flow and temperature control, including incorporation of heat exchanger and a circulating bath with improved cooling range. Discrete experiments measuring parts per million water content within temperature ranges of -20°C ≤ T ≤ 20°C at a constant flow rate were then conducted to assess performance capability of the new system.

The Outcomes

A controllable recirculating fuel rig capable of achieving repeatable temperature set points, and flow rate of interest. Improved instrumentation capability for conducting experiments to understand temperature-dependent changes in water content in Jet A1 fuel.

The Benefits

MDS Pro-DAS system

• Availability of instrumentation and lab-scale setup for ice crystals characterization in jet fuels.
• Provision of empirical data on the behavior of unadulterated fuel exposed to extreme temperature differential

Testimonial

“The Red River College team has successfully developed a unique capability to study, characterize and control ice formation in aircraft fuel systems. This experimental capability offers us the opportunity to investigate the effects of ice formation in fuels under a variety of concentrations and temperatures thus leading to safer, more efficient fuel systems.”

– David Simpson, Executive Director, EnviroTREC

Collaborators

In advance of the inaugural 2019 Vehicle Technology International Conference, we are profiling a number of guest speakers who will be covering a range of topics relating to vehicle technology. We are pleased to welcome Eddy Zuppel from National Research Council Canada (NRC) to speak on current and future trends related to vehicle testing, simulation and modelling, as well as NRC’s vehicle-level testing capabilities.

Tell us a little bit about yourself – your background, field of interest, where do you work and what are your areas of expertise?

“I am currently the Program Leader of the Vehicle Propulsion Technologies program. As Program Leader, I oversee research and development (R&D) activities aimed at assisting Canadian industry and policy development in vehicle electrification and clean transportation sectors. Specifically, I manage a yearly budget of $6M related to over 30 projects in the areas of electric motors, energy storage and hydrogen fuel cells.

I joined the NRC in 2015 as a senior project manager following 11 years in industry where I held different managerial positions, including Section Chief of a multidisciplinary team of 20 engineers.

I hold a Bachelor’s and a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering from McGill University and have co-authored eight scientific publications.”

What sparked your interest in vehicle technology?

“Influenced by my father who was a CNC programmer in the transportation industry, I have always been fascinated with the development of mechanical systems and their integration into vehicles that allow us to efficiently and confidently explore new destinations.”

Register for the 2019 Vehicle Technology International Conference here.

Red River College is proud to host the inaugural 2019 Vehicle Technology International Conference next week, and to welcome a number of guest speakers from Manitoba and beyond to speak on a variety of topics relating to vehicle technology. One speaker is Curtis Ross, CEO/President of the Thompson Regional Airport. Get to know Curtis and some of the topics he’ll be covering, below.

In addition to being the CEO/President of the Thompson Regional Airport, Curtis is also an entrepreneur and long-time business owner involved in commercial development and infrastructure related to winter weather testing in Thompson. He has been involved with the Ford Global Cold Weather test facility and currently works with Honda Canada on testing platforms and programs in Thompson. Curtis was instrumental in attracting and developing the Ford test facility and working with local entrepreneurs to expand the facility over the past 15 years.

Curtis has lived in Thompson for 30 years and is proud to be a graduate of Red River College in the trades program as a red seal carpenter, and he continues to build to this day. He is currently guiding the $70 million redevelopment of the Thompson Airport over the next four years, which will continue to make it a global hub for testing, tourism and freight distribution. Curtis and his private companies continue to be go-to place for winter weather testing logistics in Thompson, Manitoba. He also promotes the Thompson Airport and its facilitates for vehicle and aviation winter testing.

Tell us a little bit about yourself – your background, field of interest, where do you work and what are your areas of expertise?

“I continue to be a builder and developer involved in numerous commercial ventures. I’m a northerner by heart and moved to Thompson, like most people, for two years and ended up loving it and have now been here for 30 years.  My wife and I, along with some friends, also owned and operated a resort in Riding Mountain National Park which we sold a few years ago.

I want the next generation of tradespeople to know that they may start out as a tradesperson and that is a skillset they will continue to utilize for the rest of their lives in ways they may not even have envisioned when they first started out. I am intrigued and amazed at how building technologies continue to change and improve, and to this day I remain a student of the industry.”

What sparked your interest in vehicle technology?

“It’s hard to say if it was the technology alone that sparked my interest in the testing industry. I would say it was the infrastructure and testing parameters required by different testers to allow for them to test their technology. What myself and others realized was the requirement and demand for real time testing versus controlled environment testing didn’t meet the certification sign-off requirements of manufacturers. Thompson has optimum infrastructure and winter conditions, in a great location at a highly competitive cost per vehicle and tester point. In the last five years, the technology aspect of the testing is becoming a much more competitive field but also a highly confidential component of the business.”

Give us a taste of the topics you’ll cover at the Vehicle Technology International Conference?

“I will cover more of what makes Thompson, Manitoba attractive to many of the manufacturers, including:

• Vehicles – commercial and retail domestic models.
• Aircraft components, aircraft and helicopters.
• Snowmobiles, ATVs UTVs and snow blowers.

I will also speak to the need for entrepreneurs and the opportunities for industry partners to continue to grow the testing in Thompson.”

Anything else you’d like to add?

“I would encourage our municipal, provincial, and federal governments to partner at all levels with those looking to grow the industry in Manitoba as a whole. We owe it to the environment and the next generations to be leaders instead of followers when it comes to new technologies and the development and manufacturing of them.”

Click here to register for the 2019 Vehicle Technology International Conference.

In anticipation of the inaugural 2019 Vehicle Technology International Conference, we’re profiling some of our guest speakers to highlight the fascinating topics they’ll cover. Below, learn more about Parimala Thulasiraman, professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manitoba:

Tell us about yourself – your background, field of interest, where do you work and what are your areas of expertise?

“I am a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manitoba. I received my B.Eng. (Honours) and M.A.Sc. degrees in Computer Engineering from Concordia University in Montreal, and obtained my Ph.D. from the University of Delaware in Newark, DE, USA after finishing most of my formalities in the Department of Computer Science at McGill University in Montreal.

My research interests are in developing, designing and implementing parallel and distributed algorithms for complex network optimization and graph analytic real world problems. In particular, in the parallel computing area, my focus is on futuristic multi-core architectures and quantum computers.

Within the distributed computing area, my research interests are in mobile ad hoc and vehicular ad hoc networks.  To design algorithms, I borrow ideas from nature. Nature is highly parallel, distributed, adaptive and very efficient. The way ants forage for food or the way termites communicate with each other in the event of danger can be applied to solving routing or security problems in dynamic networks, respectively.”

What sparked your interest in vehicle technology?

“Autonomous vehicles are the future of transportation. Although the road network is static, the vehicular network is dynamic. As I was studying this problem, I realized that nature inspired techniques would be very useful in solving some of the challenging problems in vehicle technology. I saw a one-to-one mapping between a vehicle and a real ant in nature. Both are autonomous and communication is decentralized. The challenge I found, however, is how to map the mathematically defined nature-inspired models to the issues pertaining to dynamic applications. This sparked my interest. We cannot apply the existing nature inspired algorithms as is to solving problems. Some innovation and creativity is needed in designing decentralized, distributed algorithms. There is some fundamental research to be done in this area and it is fascinating to part of it.”

Give us a taste of the topics you’ll cover at the Vehicle Technology International Conference?

“I will be discussing the traffic aware routing problem as a single objective and multi-objective optimization problem. I will discuss the latest work on how we cluster the road points based on the flow of traffic on the road and how we predict traffic on these clusters using machine learning. In this work, traffic is the only optimization parameter. However, besides traffic, there are other parameters we can optimize on the network, that changes the problem from a single objective to multi-objective optimization problem, which is complicated to solve. The multi-objective optimization problem for routing is solved using genetic algorithm, an evolutionary, nature inspired algorithm.”

Anything else you’d like to add?

“I am excited to learn from the other speakers and audience at the conference. I would like to mention that my research would not have been possible without my research team consisting of undergraduate and graduate (MSc and PhD) students and post doctoral fellows. One of my graduate students will be presenting at this symposium.”

Register for VTIC 2019 by going to rrc.ca/vtec2019.

The inaugural Vehicle Technology International Conference begins one week from today at the Victoria Inn Hotel & Convention Centre in Winnipeg. RRC is pleased to welcome a range of speakers who will be covering topics relating to the evolution and future of vehicle technology in Canada in beyond.

Frank Douma is one of the guest speakers featured at this year’s conference. He is director of the State and Local Policy Program at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, and a research scholar at the Center for Transportation Studies, both located at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on policy and legal issues related to transportation technologies. He has authored several legal and academic articles on the topic, and been quoted in newspapers ranging from the New York Times to the Fergus Falls Daily Journal.

Get to know Frank Douma below:

Tell us a little bit about yourself – your background, field of interest, where do you work and what are your areas of expertise?

“My research focuses on policy and legal issues related to transportation technologies, including telework, tolling and other transportation finance tools, safety, and self-driving vehicles. I have had an  interest in transportation issues for much of my life, but had no idea that I could make a career out of studying them until the summer after my third year at Grinnell College, when I participated in an internship in Southeast England. For eight weeks, I studied the anticipated impacts of the opening of the Channel Tunnel on the Borough of Ashford, a railroad town that became the only rail stop between London and the Tunnel.

This exposure to planning as a practice led me to obtain a Masters Degree in Public Affairs and a Law Degree from the University of Minnesota. The decision became fortuitous as my work in Ashford helped me obtain a research assistant position at the Humphrey School, looking at the potential environmental issues created by new transportation technologies. As I moved towards graduation and beyond, I parlayed that work into positions with the Twin Cities’ Metropolitan Airports Commission, Minnesota Department of Transportation, and the Canadian Pacific Railway.

I returned to academia in 1999 as a Research Fellow with the State and Local Policy Program, the same organization I worked with as a student at the Humphrey School. I was named the second Director in the history of the State and Local Policy Program in October 2015.

I have been quoted in news stories in the New York Times, and Wall Street Journal, as well as the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Fergus Falls Daily Journal and White Bear Press – given the name of the Program, I’m most proud of the latter stories! – along with authoring a number of articles in legal and academic journals. Also, while work and family life seem to have colluded to keep me from further travel abroad (except Canada), and I have never been in a tenured or tenure track academic position, I believe my ability to find new research opportunities and define key research questions for nearly 20 years comes from understanding bureaucratic politics and understanding the meaning of life through and courses in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.”

What sparked your interest in vehicle technology?

“I have always had an interest in transportation, but my first exposure to advanced technology came with my student position at the Humphrey School, where I joined a project examining the possible impacts of “Intelligent Vehicle/Highway Systems” (now “Intelligent Transportation Systems”) on the environment. At the time, many environmentalists and others interested in social justice were skeptical that these new technologies were going to solve the existing disparities in transportation, where those who could not afford to, or were otherwise unable to, drive their own vehicle face a significant disadvantage. Since then, I have looked at ways technology could be used to address those disparities.

A breakthrough opportunity presented itself when Google re-charged the conversation about the possibility of self-driving vehicles becoming a reality, because once we remove the requirement of having to own and be physically able to drive, the ability to access transportation that is available when one wants it, at an affordable price, becomes possible.”

Give us a taste of the topics you’ll cover at the Vehicle Technology International Conference?

“I will focus on the policy level obstacles and opportunities I mention above, as they relate to development and deployment of connected and automated vehicles. I will outline some of the misconceptions (such as how we cannot deploy the technology because lawyers will prevent it) as well as some of the real opportunities for deployment. I’ll further note that there still is room for improvement and change in policy if we want to address the disparities I mention above, however. Hopefully, some of the lessons I have learned in looking at this topic from the US perspective will also lead to useful insight on Canadian policy and law as well!”

To register for the conference, please visit rrc.ca/vtec2019

Red River College is hosting the inaugural Vehicle Technology International Conference, September 30 – October 2 at the Victoria Inn Hotel & Convention Centre in Winnipeg. RRC is excited to welcome a range of speakers who will be covering topics relating to the evolution and future of vehicle technology in Canada in beyond. Get to know one of the speakers, Ying Ying Liu, below:

“Nine years ago, I came to Canada as an immigrant from China. With a degree in Information Management and Systems, I worked at IBM China in business operation. I always had a fascination with the technical world and wanted to learn more about what happens behind the scenes. So when I came to Canada, I decided to start fresh by going back to school, where I embraced every single opportunity to learn.

After receiving my second bachelor’s degree in Computer Science with First Class Honours from the University of Manitoba in 2013, I went on to get my Master’s in 2016. I am now a PhD student. I have strong academic performance and a passion in solving real world problems with technologies. I also work at Manitoba Hydro as a system developer.

I joined InterDisciplinary Evolutionary Algorithmic Sciences (IDEAS) lab in 2013. My research areas are in computational intelligence, high performance computing, and distributed algorithms. My recent interest is in traffic-aware many objective dynamic route planning. I find this topic interesting because it is both theoretical and practical.

Individual vehicle routing refers to the task of finding the optimal travel path from place A to place B. With classical static routing algorithms, this problem is usually solved by finding the shortest path on a graph representing a road map with the weight of an edge representing the actual geometric distance between two junctions. A static routing algorithm is run once at the path planning stage and does not consider dynamic traffic information such as congestion, accidents and road closure.

As congestion becomes alarmingly severe in modern metropolitan areas, traffic-aware vehicle routing is one of the important problems in improving quality of life and building smart cities with higher productivity, less air pollution and less fuel consumption. In our problem setting, the road network is modelled as a graph with constantly changing edge weights, and a vehicle makes routing decision based on real-time and predictive traffic as it goes.

Our traffic-aware dynamic routing is composed of three steps:

1. distributive road network clustering using real-time traffic
2. traffic prediction at cluster level
3. the vehicle incorporates the road network, clustering, and traffic information into its path planning algorithm to find a set of solutions for the optimizations of total vehicular emission cost (TEC), travel time, number of turns, and distance.

I would like to thank the organizers of the Vehicle Technology International Conference to give me the opportunity to present research work of the IDEAS lab. I look forward to attending the conference!”

Register for the Vehicle Technology International conference here.

Today, Red River College (RRC) revealed a brand-new resource that highlights the potential for positive change that is released in a low-income community when their youngest citizens have access to intense early childhood services. Community of Change is a new website that demonstrates how changing vulnerable children’s early learning opportunities not only has a positive effect on them but creates a positive ripple effect on the adults around them.

The project is the result of a partnership between Red River College, Manidoo Gi-Miini Gonaan, and Healthy Child Manitoba. RRC received nearly $234,000 in funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) in 2016 to support new research examining how an early childhood intervention program influenced the parents and staff at the Lord Selkirk Park Child Care Centre.

“The funding we received from SSHRC allowed Red River College to bolster our leadership role in social innovation research and knowledge mobilization,” said Christine Watson, VP Academic, Red River College. “Projects like these highlight our ongoing and innovative work in the areas of health and social sciences – work we couldn’t do without the support of our partners and community.”

To celebrate the launch of Community of Change and to thank the families and staff who participated in the research project, RRC and its partners hosted a launch event at Turtle Island Neighbourhood Centre.

“It’s important for us to celebrate this work with those who helped shape it. The families who agreed to tell their stories are really at the core of this research project,” said Jan Sanderson, Research Chairperson for the Research School of Health Sciences at RRC.

“Many studies have demonstrated that young children living in economically challenged circumstances face an uphill battle to meet their developmental milestones and enter kindergarten ready for the education challenges ahead,” continued Sanderson. “Fortunately, research also tells us that we can change that trajectory by intervening early and providing services that support both young children and their parents. The project at Lord Selkirk Park is demonstrating exactly that. We have seen the ripple effect boost a child’s potential, and suddenly the parent is also engaged, motivated and inspired to explore their own developmental path. Kids benefit, families benefit, and the community grows stronger and healthier.”

To learn more about the project findings, visit communityofchange.org.

Over the last 30 to 40 years, hundreds of thousands of Canadian homes have been retrofitted to reduce energy consumption. These retrofits have included measures to reduce air leakage, increase the thermal resistance of the building envelope and replace or upgrade mechanical systems. Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) has been a central player in this field and has worked closely with provincial and territorial governments as well as various energy utilities to establish programs capable of assisting those who wish to retrofit their home. As part of these initiatives, approximately 950,000 houses have received pre-retrofit airtightness tests. Out of these, close to 780,000 have also had post-retrofit tests performed.

To read more, please download the full report: Air Filtration – Cost of Air-Sealing Measures – a report prepared for Sustainable Buildings and Communities CanmetENERGY, Natural Resources Canada, by Proskiw Engineering Ltd.