These bridges are designed to fail, but it’s all in the interest of education.
Civil engineering students who have been working to build model bridges invite the campus community to watch as their projects are tested and evaluated, Wednesday in the CAW Student Centre Commons.
Who knew that windmills are territorial? According to an article published online this week by the Ontario Council on University Research, UWindsor researcher Rupp Carriveau did—and his work can turn that knowledge into better wind farms.
Placed too close together, turbines interfere with one another, reducing their overall efficiency, but Dr. Carriveau, an associate professor in civil and environmental engineering, is working to determine how strategic placement can exploit the windmills’ wakes to increase power generation.
An artistic streak and a keen awareness of the importance of making complex information understandable translated into a first place province-wide video contest finish this week for an engineering student and amateur filmmaker.
“It was something creative,” Brian Cheung said of making the video that explains the operation of an underwater compressed air energy storage system he works on as a master’s student in civil and environmental engineering. “It was a nice break from research and calculations.”
Rupp Carriveau feels like a torchbearer for UWindsor’s research community.
“We have so many people doing such incredible things and that’s what really makes me proud,” said Dr. Carriveau. An associate professor in civil and environmental engineering, he’s participating in a province-wide awareness campaign aimed at convincing the general public about the importance of university research.
A search committee invites nominations and applications by May 15 for the position of Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
The position will commence July 1, 2012, for a term of five years. Candidates must hold a tenured position in the department. For more information, please see the online posting of the internal search.
A UWindsor engineer hopes the testing he conducted for a local solar energy supplier will help the firm expand and grow.
 Sreekanta Das. |
The campus chapters of UNICEF and Engineers Without Borders invite the UWindsor community to consider the relationship between food security and access to fresh water during their observance of World Water Day in the CAW Student Centre on Thursday, March 22.
The student groups will set up a booth with information on everything from how much water is used to grow crops to the ways that growing competition for scarce resources can affect food security. The student engineers will have on hand a treadle pump, which uses human power to irrigate fields.
A degree completion program allowing engineering students from Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to finish their educations in Windsor represents a great collaborative partnership, says Saint Mary’s dean of science, Steven Smith.
“It will give our students a much broader range of options than they already have,” he said Tuesday. “Windsor has incredible programs with fantastic faculty and facilities.”
One of the challenges in developing wind power is how to store energy generated during off-peak hours. A UWindsor engineering professor’s research into a unique solution will be the focus of a lead segment on tonight’s edition of Daily Planet on the Discovery Channel.
When Aaron Blata graduates from engineering school he says he’d like to make a career of retrofitting old buildings.
“Either that or demolishing them,” said the Civil and Environmental engineering student.
His destructive streak might easily be explained by the fact that he spent about 100 hours this semester building a model of an ancient device used by medieval warriors to smash the walls of fortified cities during long sieges.
