News archive - 2012

Friday, December 21, 2012

Change in leadership for WatCAR

Duane Cronin, a mechanical and mechatronics engineering professor, is the new executive director for the Waterloo Centre for Automotive Research (WatCAR). He succeeds Amir Khajepour, also of mechanical and mechatronics engineering, who held the position for more than three years.

Cronin's automotive research focuses on vehicle crashworthiness and occupant safety. Recent projects include collaborations on occupant modeling with an assembler consortium including Chrysler, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai and Nissan, as well as work with 3M in automotive adhesives.

Friday, December 14, 2012

CEE professor and students win water distribution design challenge

Bryan Tolson, a civil and environmental engineering professor, co-op student Ayman Khedr and doctoral candidate Masoud Asadzadeh recently came in second out of 14 teams in a Water Distribution Network design optimization challenge at the WDSA conference in Adelaide, Australia. The design problem they tackled involved minimizing design costs, greenhouse gas emissions and a measure of overall water age. The team members evaluated 20,000 solutions on a desktop PC using their multi-objective PA-DDS algorithm to help pick a design.

Friday, December 14, 2012

Researchers receive Carbon Management Canada funding for projects

Two Waterloo Engineering research projects have received over $212,000 in funding from Carbon Management Canada. John Wen and Robert Varin, both of mechanical and mechatronics engineering, will use the money to characterize and evaluate the on-site adsorption and carbonation of flue gas CO2 in ball-milling activated mine waste. The purpose of their project is to modify the microstructures of mine waste and limestone for minimizing energy consumption and increasing the capacity of CO2 sequestration.

Monday, December 10, 2012

ECE PhD student wins best paper award

A paper written by doctoral candidate Sailesh Bharati and electrical and computer engineering professor Weihua Zhuang was honoured with the best paper award at this year's IEEE Globecom Conference held December 3 to 7 in Anaheim, California.The title of the winning paper is “Performance Analysis of Cooperative ADHOC MAC for Vehicular Networks.” [conference details]

Friday, December 7, 2012

Associate dean of outreach recalls memories of Dec. 6 1989

Mary Wells was just beginning her career when she heard the news on December 6, 1989 that 14 young women had been gunned down at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique.