Engineering students place second in provincial design competition

A team of fourth-year environmental engineering students earned second place in a provincial competition for designing an innovative stormwater management system accentuated with green spaces.

After submitting a 120-page report, Christina Ure, Shannon Deehan, James Park and Lina Florian had 15 minutes to present their design to a panel of judges April 2 at the Shaw Centre in Ottawa. This year’s Water Environment Association of Ontario’s Student Design Competition challenged eight university teams to design a storm water management system for Exhibition Place, a mixed-use district located by the shoreline of Lake Ontario in Toronto.

“It was a great learning opportunity,” Ure said. “The judges were impressed with our proposal to design a hanging rain garden system to deal with polluted runoff from elevated highways.”

The team’s design focused on enhancing and retrofitting problem areas, like parking lots and rooftops, within the site. Judges included representatives from the Water Environment Association of Ontario, the Ontario Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change and the City of Toronto.

“We are very proud of our students,” said professor Rajesh Seth, who supervised the team along with Tirupati Bolisetti. “Since the competition’s inception in 2009, UWindsor teams have finished in second place seven times and first place twice. More importantly, we have received very positive feedback over the years from the judges over the quality of the design work conducted by these students.”

The annual student design competition gives post-secondary student teams from Ontario a chance to work on a real-world problem in the water industry.