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ChE 4W04: Capstone Design - Entrepreneurial Engineering Stream

We are proud to present the innovative final year capstone projects from our chemical engineering students. The following videos demonstrate these projects, which represent the culmination of a year’s work and a chance to demonstrate both theoretical and applied skills.

If you are an industry who is willing to collaborate with the department to support our graduating students, please contact the course coordinator, Shelir Ebrahimi, to receive more information on how you can be involved.

Shelir Ebrahimi Profile Photo

Shelir Ebrahimi

Assistant Professor (CLA)

About the Entrepreneurial Stream

The Department of Chemical Engineering at McMaster University has developed a new branch for the final-year capstone project structure that is focused on industry-student collaborations to solve or investigate a problem posed by potential industrial partners. The over-arching goal of this Capstone design in which teams participate in a self-directed industry-driven projects, which we are calling the entrepreneurial engineering, is to provide students opportunities to solve real-world problems while simultaneously providing value to the companies willing to support them.

Capstone Design Projects of 2019-2020

Team Members: Conor Marshall, Daniel Khokhlov, Folarin Ologunagba, Ahmed Elmoursi, Ali Mahmoud
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Thomas Adams 
Project Description: The Ontario Power Generation (OPG) thermal power plant in Atikokan is investigating newtechnologies that will promote a clean energy future in Ontario. The Atikokan facility looks to upgrade its facility to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, following suit with the rest of OPG’s facilities and all of Ontario. This project involves the selection and evaluation of three distinct but related process technologies, capturing biogenic CO2 from the Atikokan stack gases, producing hydrogen with renewable electricity and finally combining these outputs into renewable methanol.The team’s responsibilities are to examine the feasibility of such upgrades from process, economic, environmental, and safety standpoints.   
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Team Members: Raisa Hoq, Ezra Widajat, Adam Opolski, Moira Song, Ace Maizer
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Jake Nease 
Project Description: Due to their significant CO2 reduction capabilities, HATCH has identified end-of-pipe technologies as a potential solution to mitigating CO2 emissions within steel processes. This project is to investigate the implementation of end-of-pipe separation and utilization technologies, ultimately designing and modelling the process with the selected technologies. The objective is to mitigate plant-gate CO2 emissions within the steelmaking industry by effectively capturing and utilizing CO2 to generate further value-added products. 

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Team Members: Lisa Tran, Evan Krushelnycky, Ryan Seto, Jonathan Tong 
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Li Xi 
Project Description: Roofs are an important component in protecting the structural integrity of a building. There are a variety of roofing materials currently available on the market. research is being conducted on roofing materials and compositions to minimize the severity of hail damage in areas with high frequencies of hailstorms. Many parts of North America are regularly affected by hailstorms and hail-resistant roofing has significant market demand, especially in areas regarded as “Hail Alley” in Alberta, Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming. The main goal of this project is to develop a production plan focusing on the manufacturing scale up of the exiting patented formulation for a client at McMaster University.  

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Team Members: Evan Ubene, Alexander Mckay, Erik Frechette, Tracy Savery, Kyle Heyblom 
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Thomas Adams 
Project Description: The client of this project is a lubricants refinery company located in ON which is one of the largest refineries of its kind in Canada and the largest White Oil producer in the world. The main products that are produced at this plant include lubricant base oils ranging from specialty food grade White Oils to high viscosity index Group 3+ base oils. Sulphur dioxide is a contaminant that the Company is responsible for monitoring. The main goal of this project is to develop a real-time system that uses an atmospheric air dispersion model to calculate POI (point of impingement) concentrations caused by plant emission sources as they occur.  

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Video Presentation

Team Members: Melissa Cusack Striepe, Matt Csordas, Christina Hassey, Natasha Reis-Murray, Noelle Wilton 
Faculty Advisor: Dr. David Latullipe 
Project Description: The manufacturing of pharmaceutical products is subject to stringent regulatory constraints. For this reason, process steps such as filtration are introduced to remove contaminants and ultimately ensure product quality. However, upstream process fluctuations may compromise filter integrity, which results in costly investigations and potential loss of product. This project focuses on addressing such challenges at a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility through evaluating the existing product transfer line and designing an improved system. This redesign will focus on introducing improved process control, new instrumentation, and alternative modes of operation. 

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Team Members: Janine Hidalgo, Henry Zihan Zhou, Arujala Thavendrarasa, Nelson Mok, Ratul Matin 
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Shelir Ebrahimi 
Project Description: Emerson currently offers an alternative solution for the disposal of food waste. Grind2Energy is a system that takes food waste as an input and produces slurry as an output to be stored in a tank on-site. Once the storage tank reaches a critical-level, Emerson is notified to transport the slurry to a local anaerobic digestion (AD) facility, where the slurry is converted into different products. Currently, Emerson’s involvement is linear and stops with the AD facility. The goal of this project, which is proposed by Emerson Canada, is to develop a feasible closed-loop system that creates value from the food waste produced by McMaster University and converting it into resources that will be useful to the institution.  

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Events

Virtual Capstone Showcase Day 2020

Virtual Capstone Showcase Day 2020

We know how hard our students have been working on their capstone projects all semester. While the in-person Capstone Showcase event is cancelled, we want showcase their amazing work to their classmates, faculty, family and friends who support them.