University of Calgary engineering students held their annual capstone fair on April 1, but the solutions they offered to solve the real-world issues that Canadians face were no joke.

Far from it, in fact, as the projects presented a variety of technological and engineering solutions of getting alternatively-abled individuals mobile again, reducing the high costs of snow removal, to better planning Calgary’s 5A roads and pathway system, and even addressing the need for power generation in Northern Alberta.

Much of the capstone work also involved innovation in material sciences, which drew industry professionals involved in diverse fields from medical technology to national defence to the fair to speak with students.

All of that work was made ever more impressive because of the short time students had to complete their capstone project alongside their regular final year of classwork, said Anders Nygren, Dean for the Schulich School of Engineering.

“It’s so impressive, and especially when you think of they’ve done this over the last seven months or so. It’s not the only thing they’ve been doing over the last seven months. They’ve probably been taking four courses or so in addition to working on these projects,” Nygren said.

“When you think about these students four or five years ago entering as first-year students straight out of high school, and getting to this level today, it blows me away every year.”

He said that the takeaway every year from the capstone fair is that there are now 750 students who are ready and able to enter into the engineering workforce, and provide huge contributions to the local economy.

“Many of the ideas come to us from industry, and I think one of the things the students get out of this is to get to work with industry on realistic problems and then make the connections with industry potential future employers to get into the workforce,” Nygren said.

Those industry-prompted problems don’t always mean addressing the largest economic issues that companies like Lockheed Martin or Cenovus are facing—although those companies have also worked with capstone students.

Life-changing engineering for students

Projects like Ride4All were prompted by the needs of high school students with mobility and developmental disabilities using the educational support services of Youth En Route.

Students designed new handlebars, larger pedals, mode-changeable drive trains, and remotely controlled speed and braking systems for the tricycles that the charity provides for schools.

“One of the key issues was the first fix to the free-wheeled drive train. So, most of the trikes on the market only have one mode, and there you aren’t able to change easily between them, if at all. So, one of the big issues was finding a way to switch between the two,” said Alexandria Veckenstedt, project manager for Ride4All.

“Another issue was the adaptability. Most of the trikes were designed for one specific size of person, so we wanted to kind of adjust the handle bars, seat and pedals to make it accessible for a range of people and abilities.”

She said that when her group, which consisted of herself, Maria Saravia, Thomas Urrea Beltran, Yifan Yu, Derek Zamzow, and Marcus Zamzow, were looking for a project, the one suggested by Youth En Route really stood out because of the community impact aspect.

“A lot of these projects, while they’re phenomenal, they don’t always go somewhere. They’re not always quite as applicable, or it’s very niche. This is one that we felt would be able to have some real impact with people, and not just be an end to a grade,” Veckenstedt said.

Laura Shutiak, Executive Director for Youth En Route, said that it was hard to describe just how life-changing a ride on a tricycle can be for some of the students they serve.

“For a kid that can get out of a wheelchair and onto a bike again, it gets their legs moving when maybe their legs don’t normally move or it also gets them thinking about stop and start commands, following instructions. These really good learning things that teachers say is just invaluable,” Shutiak said.

“It’s also behaviour regulation. They don’t want to walk, or they don’t want to run, they don’t want to exercise. But you put them on a bike, and that’s regulating behaviour in a way that’s fun and accessible.”

She said that in an underfunded education system that doesn’t always have the tools available for students outside the typical needs, having trikes and bikes available is hugely beneficial to both the students and to teachers.

Veckenstedt said most of the adaptations made to their tricycle were entirely novel and aren’t available on the market. An example, she said, was the group’s clip-on design for far larger pedals.

“When you talk about the pedal attachments, a lot of the ones on the market right now are either six pounds of Velcro so it’s very difficult to get the kids in and out of them, or you aren’t able to easily switch between and you can’t have different options,” she said.

The cost for the additions and trike was approximately $2,500. An amount that Shutiak said once refined could be brought down to less than $2,000 with refinement and into the realm of purchasable for school use.

“If we could buy eight of them, that would be amazing. We have the need and we have waiting lists right now for our tricycles,” she said.

Giving the dignity of mobility to children who cannot move

Another project that aimed to address the need of children, was NeuroMove, which worked with the Cumming School of Medicine’s pediatric brain-computer interface program BCI4Kids and involved software, biomedical, and mechanical engineering students.

Alex Berezowski showed off the autonomous wheelchair prototype that he and his group created, which gives children with locked-in syndrome—a condition that prevents a child from moving any of their muscles from the neck down, including the vocal cords or neck—the ability to move on their own.

“The biggest thing is the parents are bringing in the kids to see this, and watching them go from ‘my kid is going to be in this wheelchair that they can’t move forever,’ to ‘they could be an independent person.’ Because this can be integrated with opening doors or YouTube, or anything they could use to be an independent human,” he said.

The group consisted of Berezowski, Danielle Jourdain, Morgan Kerr, Philippa Madill, Haden Scheirman, Liam Workman, alongside Dr. Eli Kinney-Lang, who leads the technical arm of BCI4Kids.

He said the technology integrates the BCI4Kids research with a prototype wheelchair base that has a LiDAR sensor, which then allows for the user to determine where they want to go inside of a room, with the autonomous direction software determining the safest way to get there and then moving the user.

“The BCI4Kids Lab has worked with paraplegic kids for a while but they haven’t been able to tackle this problem for someone with complex mobility needs. Being able to give them movement that currently isn’t thought to be possible was incredible,” said Dr. Kinney-Lang.

“This just frankly hasn’t been done before. It’s awesome to see the patient partners just light up when they see that them moving independently is a possibility, especially when the patients we focus on are four years old to 12 years old.”

Berezowski said that the next step for the project would be to hand it back to BCI4Kids Lab, where graduate students would be refining the prototype and bringing it to a deployable level.

“Hopefully from there they can get ethical certifications and start going through the process of making it a [medical] device,” he said.

Keeping people moving doesn’t always mean on wheels

One of the projects designed to address mobility, on a more municipal sized scale, was a project to find ways to reduce the cost of snow removal.

The capstone group of Garrett Romanzin, Hasnat Zaheer, Mohammed Mustakim Chowdhury Faraz, Mohamed Alghussein, Bhavjeet Chatha, and Farhan Asif designed an underground heated piping system to clear snow a kilometre walkway at a time.

The project was sponsored by the Foundation of the Energy Collective, which, while based in Calgary, has a 130-acre property in Priddis, Alberta, that is labour and cost-intensive to clear of snow.

“Everyone’s aware of the heat-snow removal kind of process: You typically have it in your garage or somewhere to heat up the snow to get it off. But that’s a smaller-scale system. So, our design idea essentially is to apply to a larger scale system,” said Asif.

“What we did was we used the idea and ideology of using that in a smaller-scale implement to a larger-scale system.”

He said that what they were able to figure out was how to use a cross-linked polyethylene material, more commonly known as PEX, in a novel way for underground heating that is different from the normal PEX usage for small-scale heating applications, and as an alternative for steel piping for large-scale installations.

“PEX comes (with its) own pros and cons, just like anything else, but we have looked at the pros and cons. The idea is that it meets the requirement for the temperature to melt the snow, and it meets the requirement for the cost for them, which makes it cheaper in this case,” Asid said.

“Essentially, people don’t implement [PEX] on larger scale because it’s such a big risk to put so much investment into it and put on a larger scale. But I think if this works out, there’s something that could definitely be used on an even larger scale.”

Zaheer said that what that means is that the installation cost would be between $24,000 to $30,000 for an entire system and then between $400 and $500 per year in maintenance costs.

“If there’s snowfall happening around seven to eight months, the labour costs to actually remove the snow from the entire one kilometre walkway is a lot. So, having an alternative cost of only $400 or $500 we will have a return on the investment in around two to three years time, which will obviously be very beneficial to smaller companies,” Zaheer said.

He said that one of the interesting aspects of the project for him was that he worked as an intern engineer in Alberta’s oil and gas industry, and was then able to transfer those skills to other engineering ideas.

“This was more so dealing with, to some degree, a liquid as well. I wanted to see how it would deviate when we’re using a liquid, and how it would actually alter the flow, how the temperature would be different. And also using PEX instead of working on stainless steel pipes, and how we could do pipe integrity on those,” Zaheer said.

“Most underground pipes typically have some sort of correlation with each other. All have some sort of flow, and the pipes all need to be maintained and taken care of… taking that into something different, such as heating walkways, is something completely different. We wanted to see how things were different and similar in this department, which is why we set to take on the snow removal.”