Collaboration means better research
When industry gets involved with universities in doing applied research, the result is often better engineered and far more likely to be used in the real world
When Rick Hermann started out in the construction industry in the early 1980s, hightech was a mobile phone the size of a brick. When he needed to print out a work schedule for a job site, he painstakingly transferred every word, letter by letter, from a sheet of Letraset onto a sheet of paper.
It was 1986 before Hermann — working in an industry that remains conservative in its adoption of computer technology — encountered Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet program and began to appreciate the potential of computers for cataloguing and sorting information.
“I’m not a computer geek, but I recognized enough value in it that I said ‘ Hey, this is where I have to spend some effort,’” he recalled.
Today Hermann, a manager with Edmonton- based PCL Industrial Management, is something of a technology ambassador and a mentor to doctoral and masters students in the construction engineering and management program at University of Alberta.
The program, led by Simaan AbouRizk, UAlberta’s senior research chair in construction engineering and management, has been a pioneer at developing computer programs — 25 and counting — that increase the industry’s efficiency.
AbouRizk, working with Hermann and others, has invented ways for the industry to save time and money by solving large, complex construction problems such as the assembly of facilities like oilsands processing plants. His group’s work has been recognized by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Technology developed in collaboration with University of Alberta has given PCL an edge in bidding on major infrastructure projects, said Hermann. The company, which began in 1906, counts among its projects the new Vancouver Convention Centre, Abbotsford Regional Hospital and the Alex Fraser Bridge. Across Canada, the United States, Australia and the Caribbean, PCL’s divisions have engineered roads, highways, bridges, airports, hospitals, water treatment plants, and pipelines.
Hermann sits on the board of directors for AbouRizk’s research chair, and along with representatives of other companies in the construction sector he has watched their collaborative work build upon itself, project by project.
Optimization
It began for PCL with the development at UAlberta of a math model that calculates problems like optimizing operation of a crane shuttling buckets of concrete around a highrise construction site.
Then they moved on to data mining — reviewing and refining the industry’s methods for estimating the cost of a job.
More recently they developed advanced computer simulations that handle the logistics of building massive infrastructure projects such as an oilsands processing plant and a coal preparation plant in B. C.’ s Elk Valley.
Facilities are typically built off- site in pieces called modules, then shipped to their location for assembly.
In a yard outside of Edmonton, PCL has capacity to build 120 modules. The challenge as each one is assembled is to ensure it’s in the proper place in the yard so that it only has to be moved once — when it’s shipped.
Similarly, when it’s delivered, the optimal scenario has it lifted once, off the transport truck and directly onto its foundation at the plant.
“If you look at all oilsands plants, petrochemical plants, it doesn’t matter — any of those are heavily modularized,” Hermann said. “You’re building a module which is usually a 20- foot- wide, 20- to 24- foottall steel structure usually 80 to 100 feet long with pipe on it, electrical, some equipment, insulation and so on.”
A typical plant might require 150 modules. If you use a software program that tells you when and where to build and install these massive pieces of equipment, you’ll save a lot of money. For example it costs between $ 150,000 and $ 200,000 just to move a moduleenabled crane to a job site. After that, the ballpark figure to rent the crane is $ 200,000 a month, plus a dozen workers work with it.
When Hermann got into the business, nobody employed construction software management experts or project simulation engineers. Now, in Alberta, 18 of 20 major companies have grads of the UAlberta program in construction engineering and management on staff.
“This is a fairly highly fractured industry, with everybody doing their own thing and so on,” AbouRizk said. “Sometimes, when we create innovations they might be important in our minds but they never find the application simply because industry is not interested in trying or they haven’t bought into it.
“We can help a company develop models of whatever they’re building, or models of their yards, or models of their projects, and they can play around with them on the computer. They can improve them, make changes, make whatever decisions they want to make, on the computer.”
Collaboration
A similar spirit of collaboration between industry and university researchers has been progressing for decades in the oilsand sector. Karl Clark, a professor in UAlberta’s engineering faculty, developed the first method of separating bitumen from sand in Alberta’s oilsands in 1925 and today virtually every aspect of the province’s oil industry has a connection to the university.
More than 800 university and oil company scientists are working on a variety of oilsands projects. Most pursue a similar theme — reducing the environmental effect of the industry.
Murray Gray, scientific director at the Centre for Oilsands Innovation at University of Alberta, partners with Esso/ Imperial Oil on research aimed at developing waterless methods of extracting bitumen.
“That’s not commercial yet, but that’s what we’ve been focusing on most in the last five years — how to get bitumen out of oilsands without creating wet tailings, which is one of the major problems that the mining industry faces,” Gray said.
Metal mines, including those that extract copper and gold, also rely on water to separate ore from waste, Gray said.
“What’s unique about the oilsands is the scale, the volumes that are involved. That’s why wet tailings in the oilsands industry has attracted so much attention. It’s because of the magnitude of that material.
“We are working on trying to understand the fundamentals of recovering that water much faster and more cheaply than what the industry is able to do now. If you’re going to use water you’d like to get as much of it back as possible,” Gray said.
The alternative
An alternative is removing water all together from the extraction process, in favour of solvents that would render bitumen fluid enough to free it from sand, and then be removed and reused.
After years of research, “nonaqueous” or solvent- based extraction is looking “very promising” Gray said.
“The key thing with a solvent is that you would have to get it all back again and that’s the key focus of the research because you don’t want to take away one environmental problem and substitute another. With solvent you must be able to recover it, otherwise you’re just creating a bigger problem.
“Imperial Oil wants to put a pilot plant in place in the next year or two, to try out this technology. The lab is very nice for showing if it’s feasible, if it’s an attractive opportunity but you have to go to a larger scale to really prove that it’s feasible for industrial operations.”
Ultimately, the innovation centre wants to invent a way to refine bitumen into a light crude oil, which would fetch substantially higher prices on world markets than the heavy crude that’s now produced. That would add billions of dollars to Canada’s GDP, as well as tax revenue to government.
“The culture at the University of Alberta is such that industry collaboration is seen as a positive,” Gray said.
“There is this kind of opportunity at other Canadian universities to get three- way partnerships. So the government of Canada has been very active at leading the way, providing seed money and matching money to try to encourage university industry collaboration. That’s really supported a lot of this effort.”
Even for projects without such an intense industry connection, collaboration has been critical to success.
Linda Pilarski, a professor of experimental oncology at University of Alberta and Canada Research Chair in biomedical nanotechnology, leads a research group that specializes in cancers of the immune system.
Shared space
Originally, they were working in labs scattered around the university, but Pilarski found that the work was sometimes delayed by a lack of communication among team members. The university found them a space they could all share.
“We’re really diverse. We have microbiologists and chemists and engineers, for example, all having to work together,” Pilarski said. “One of the things I found out right at the beginning is if the engineers were sitting in a different lab across campus from the molecular biologists, nothing worked.
“When you are trying to cross disciplines like this, and I don’t think you can do this stuff without crossing disciplines, you really have to be physically in the same lab. If you’re even 10 minutes away, it’s not going to happen.”
The group’s work involves development of a fast, cheap, effective device to diagnose cancers.
One of the key innovations is a technique called DNA “amplification.” Instead of waiting six weeks while a laboratory examines a single strand of DNA from a patient, the UAlberta group uses a method that makes millions of “photocopies” of genes known to be important in disease. That makes a sample from a patient much easier and faster to analyze.
Pilarski’s group has developed a device, nicknamed “lab on a chip,” that is a thumbnail- size piece of equipment that can detect 80 maladies at a time, within an hour, by reading the amplified DNA sample.
It detects fast- advancing cancers requiring immediate treatment, and it has the side benefit of detecting influenza and other viruses ( such as Norwalk), malaria, and sexually transmitted diseases.
“A patient comes into a sexually transmitted disease clinic, for example,” she said. “What they want to be able to do is rapidly test, while the patients are still there because a lot of the patients that come into ( that) clinic might not ever come back again, and aren’t going to want to stay very long.
“Basically it’s like running the amplification reactions in JellO. It’s a gel. I like to say it’s so simple even I could do it.”
You could use it in a mobile health lab, a hospital, a doctor’s office or even an airport or customs and immigration office.
They’ve been at it since 1998 and this year they’re ready to start selling their product, Pilarski said.