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In the basement is RUW’s remarkable “AQUAbox Experimental Lab,” where researchers can experiment with environments that mimic those of a real city and its surroundings, especially its wetlands. Roughly the size of two tennis courts, the lab houses an enormous metal tank—a wetland simulator—that stretches the full length of the facility filled with soil, plants, and of course water. The tank can be used as a single two-metre-by-16-metre basin, or can be divided into eight square cells, each two metres on a side—or any other combination that’s needed.
A typical experiment, Reid explains, might be to vary one environmental parameter along the length of the tank—the salinity for example—while keeping everything else constant. “Wetlands play a vital role in cleaning our water as it makes its way through the environment, back to the rivers and lakes, and in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,” Reid says. “So it’s vital that we figure out how we can best nurture wetlands, and understand their function.”
SOLVING TRAFFIC SNARL UPS
Efficiently moving people around our urban centres is the focus of another lab within the CUI, the Laboratory of Innovations in Transportation (LiTrans). There, Bilal Farooq, who is a Canada Research Chair in Dis ruptive Trans portation Technologies and Services, uses big data and virtual reality to ensure that our streets are ready for auto nomous vehicles and other innovations, so that we can all share the road safely.
An entire lab at CUI, the Data Science Laboratory, focuses exclusively on data-oriented problem solving. Ayse Bener, professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, says the lab specializes in using AI (artificial intelligence) and machine-learning techniques. The research she and her colleagues have been doing has applications in transportation, health care, finance, software development, and other fields.
“We develop software that mimics experts in different domains, and try to understand how an expert solves a particular problem,” she says. “And then we can teach the machine to work like that expert, to come up with a solution.”
SAVING ENERGY
Along with food and water, energy is another vital element of urban life. At Ryerson’s Centre for Urban Energy, housed in the CUI, Bala Venkatesh, the centre’s academic director, focuses on finding sustainable solutions to critical urban-energy challenges faced by electric utilities. One of the labs that he oversees is the Schneider Electric Smart Grid Laboratory that acts like a scaled-down version of the infrastructure you’d find in an electrical utility, from transformers and control systems to the computers that handle the vast streams of data such a system produces.
“We can physically duplicate what a utility would have on the street, or in one of their sub-stations,” Venkatesh says. “This allows us to visualize how it’ll actually function when you connect it, as opposed to relying on a computer model.” The lab, funded in part by the Ontario Ministry of Energy, Northern Development and Mines, will be important for testing new technologies before they’re deployed in our cities, he says. The equipment in the smart grid lab was part of a $500,000 in-kind donation from Schneider Electric Canada.
The university already has a strong track record of collaboration with local energy providers. In 2016, with funding provided by the Ontario Ministry of Energy, Northern Development and Mines, Ryerson worked with Toronto Hydro and Ontariobased manufacturer eCAMION to develop a polemounted energy-storage device. It can be charged during off-peak hours and boost the available electricity in homes during peak hours. So far, one of these devices—a white box containing the equivalent of more than 2,000 cell phone batteries—has been deployed on a residential street near Keele Street and Sheppard Avenue West. The device’s technical merits were proven during a 12-month pilot project and may become a standard feature on utility poles throughout the city.
Anything that helps city-dwellers use energy more efficiently is an important step forward, Venkatesh says. And how we use energy—and food and water as well—is only going to become more critical in the decades ahead, as Toronto faces a period of unprecedented growth. Already the fourth-largest city in North America, Toronto is home to 2.8 million people, while nearly six million live in the surrounding metropolitan area—and that figure could double in the next 50 years. What each of those people can do, Venkatesh says, is take the time to think about where the energy they use is coming from. “We see the outlet, the light from our lamps, the warmth from our heaters,” he says. “But where is it coming from, and what is it doing to the environment? And how can we be a part of ensuring that, whatever actions we take, we work toward saving this planet not just for ourselves, but for the next generation?” 
Dan Falk (@danfalk), Journalism ’92, is a science journalist based in Toronto. His books include The Science of Shakespeare and In Search of Time.
Summer 2019 / Ryerson University Magazine 19
