The department's small class-sizes, engaging teaching practices, and hands-on learning in our state-of-the-art facilities empower our students to solve real-world problems.
The Department of Chemical Engineering is a vibrant center of collaborative research addressing some of the most pressing challenges in energy and materials. Our faculty members are engaged in a diverse array of research in areas such as machine learning and process systems engineering, CO2 capture and conversion, polymer engineering, renewable energy, synthetic biology, environmental remediation, and materials science that push the boundaries of innovation.
Find out more by exploring the programs, research and news stories on this site.
News
Analytical Lab Facilities powers research across Waterloo and beyond
The Department of Chemical Engineering’s Analytical Lab Facilities are helping advance research across the University of Waterloo and for external academic institutions, industry partners and emerging start-ups.
The Analytical Lab Facilities is a model of research infrastructure support, serving as a hub for materials characterization and chemical analysis, giving researchers access to technical expertise and specialized services, encouraging cross‑disciplinary innovation.
"Our goal is to lower the barriers to high-level research," says facility Director, Dr. Charles Dal Castel. "By providing access to advanced instrumentation and expert support, we can give researchers the tools they need to accelerate discovery."
The approach combines instruments centrally located in large communal laboratories with instruments in satellite locations (in laboratories managed by individual faculty). Much of the equipment has been acquired through grant funding, creating a shared resource that maximizes research impact.
Turning deep tech research into new start-ups
Three chemical engineering graduate students won in the Academy of Research Commercialization (ARC) inaugural pitch competition.
ARC is a new program launched jointly between the Faculty of Engineering and the Conrad School of Business in collaboration with Velocity and WatCo (Waterloo Commercialization Office).
ARC provides programming such as fund preparation, and workshops for PhD students aiming to transform deep-tech research into for-profit ventures.
Three entrepreneurially minded chemical engineering graduate students were winners of the competition.
Drew Davidson’s start-up ArcticEdge Technologies Inc. was one of the winners. Davidson, who is co-supervised by Professors Milad Kamkar and Valerie Ward, was inspired by his mother, Kelley Willemze who was a firefighter in Cambridge for over 30 years.
Using machine learning to turn fire sensor data into life-saving insight
Professor Joshua Pulsipher is part of a team of researchers that have created a data-driven analysis system that could reveal how fires behave to better inform the building code, evacuation plans and advise first responders.
Fire behavior knowledge has not kept pace with today’s architecture and furnishing materials.Fabric and foam in modern furniture can produce toxic gases when on fire and the make-up and quantity of gases change during the evolution of a building fire.
Historically, older buildings were highly ventilated. However, modern buildings are sealed for energy efficiency with a vapour barrier that blocks airflow from the outside, resulting in oxygen-starved conditions and fires leading to inefficient combustion, which creates more toxic gases along with smoke.
Events
Seminar Speaker/Professor Charles Xu
Biomass plays a key role in capturing and storing solar energy on Earth. It is estimated that up to 8,500 exjoules (×10¹⁸ joules) of solar energy are captured and stored globally each year through biomass, which is about 10-15 times the current global energy consumption (580 exajoules). This presentation provides an overview of the availability of biomass and organic solid waste resources globally, as well as in Chinese mainland and Hong Kong, and introduces hydrothermal technologies and their applications in the transformation of biomass and organic solid waste. During these transformations, water is used as a reaction medium, solvent, reactant, or catalyst. Hydrothermal technology is especially suitable for the resource utilization of high-moisture biomass and biowaste (such as food waste, sewage sludge, manure slurry, microalgae, etc.), as it eliminates the costly dehydration/drying process (which is essential for other thermochemical processes like combustion, pyrolysis, and gasification). This presentation summarizes Professor Xu's team's past research achievements in various hydrothermal technology development, including methanol aqueous phase reforming (APR) for hydrogen production, biomass hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) to produce water-charcoal, hydrothermal liquefaction of biomass waste (HTL) to produce biocrude oil, and supercritical water gasification (SCWG) of aqueous biomass (sugars) to produce green hydrogen. Professor Xu will also share his experience in scaling HTL technology to 6 kg/h and 100 kg/h, as well as ongoing commercialization efforts, including building pilot units with a daily throughput of 10 tons and demonstration units with a daily throughput of 100 tons.
PhD Comprehensive/Microfluidic - Assisted Engineering of Structured Liquid-State Soft Materials and Hierarchical Cryogel Architectures by Yasamin Noorafkan
Microfluidic - Assisted Engineering of Structured Liquid-State Soft Materials and Hierarchical Cryogel Architectures
Seminar Speaker: Professor Bruno Blais
Abstract
The simulation of flows using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has advanced considerably in recent decades and is now an essential tool across industries ranging from aerospace design to process engineering. Although CFD is relatively mature for single-phase flows, multiphase flows (such as particle-laden flows) and multiphysics flows (such as those including microwaves or ultrasound) remain significantly more challenging to simulate, in part due to their intrinsic multiscale nature and conflicting numerical need.
In the recent years, high-order methods have gained considerable momentum in aeronautics, in part due to their significantly lower dispersion and dissipation, but also for their higher arithmetic intensity (FLOPS-to-byte ratio) which suits current hardware capabilities. However, these methods remain seldomly used in chemical-engineering applications, in part due to their multiphase and multiphysics nature.