UBCO engineering Professor Dr. Mohammad Zarifi examines a prototype test blade with doctoral student Zahra Azim and lab manager Mandeep Jain. The blade has been equipped with a microwave sensor, heaters and a low interfacial toughness coating, so ice will melt automatically when detected by the sensor.

Engineers at UBC Okanagan have been collaborating with researchers from the University of Toronto to make a significant breakthrough in de-icing technology.

Their latest research, published in this month’s edition of Nature Communications, examines a smart, hybrid—meaning passive and also active—de-icing system that works by combining an interfacial coating with an ice-detecting microwave sensor.

This coating integrates the sensors into the material while enabling heat to dislodge ice without the need for a person or machine to physically melt it, explains UBCO’s Dr. Mohammad Zarifi.

“Many of us have had the misfortune of sitting on a plane waiting for it to be de-iced while fretting about missing a connecting flight,” says Dr. Zarifi an Associate Professor at UBCO’s School of Engineering and report co-author. “Our new technology takes a hybrid approach by adding sensors within an ice repellent coating that can easily be added to aviation or wind turbine blades.”

Dr. Zarifi explains that undesired ice accumulation is problematic with many renewable energy technologies such as wind turbines and hydroelectric dams, aviation and power transmission. Ice mitigation strategies can be divided into either active or passive methods. Active de-icing involves an external energy input used to remove the ice, typically through thermal, chemical or mechanical methods. In contrast, passive de-icing either reduces the accretion rate of ice, lowers the adhesion strength between ice and the surface or both.

“Neither route towards an ice-free surface is seen as a cure-all today, as active de-icing methods utilize substantial energy but passive de-icing coatings cannot keep a surface ice-free indefinitely,” he adds. “A hybrid system that combines passive and active de-icing technologies may be an attractive solution to the ice-accretion problems.”

This is why the sensor—which lives beneath the coating that will be applied to a turbine or aircraft—could be a game-changer. The sensor acts as an ice detector and prompts the embedded heaters to melt the ice automatically.

This creates a substantial improvement in energy efficiency and is what sets this latest innovation apart from existing approaches, says Zahra Azimi Dijvejin, doctoral student and lead author of the study.

“The hybrid approach allows the operator to quickly and accurately monitor the equipment sustainably,” she says. “The equipment won’t need to be de-iced unnecessarily—avoiding wear-and-tear and wasteful energy usage—because the sensors can determine the need.”

The sensors, which are integrated into innovative materials, could keep surfaces ice-free without the need for further chemicals or energy-intensive methods.

“We are moving from our experimentation phase into real-life usage, and have seen the technology hold up to harsh conditions,” explains Dr. Zarifi. “We’re currently working with Canadian turbine manufacturers to incorporate the technology for the upcoming winter.”

The research, partially funded by the Department of National Defence Canada, Tekmar, Mitacs, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation, was also selected as one of the Top 50 best recently published papers in this area by Nature communications.

The post Breaking the ice appeared first on UBC Okanagan News.

UBC Okanagan researchers are sharing a new tool for academics hoping to better understand and measure the ever-expanding world of emojis in everyday communication.

How much is really known about those smiley faces staring back at from smartphone screens? Anyone who has ever wondered if the people sending them are really that happy is not alone.

Thanks to a pair of UBC Okanagan colleagues, researchers striving to better understand the ever-expanding world of emojis now have a new tool to keep pace with technology—what they call a multidimensional lexicon of emojis (MLE).

Doctoral student Rebecca Godard and Dr. Susan Holtzman, Associate Professor in Psychology at UBCO, have published their findings in a new paper titled “The Multidimensional Lexicon of Emojis: A New Tool to Assess the Emotional Content of Emojis.” The research appears in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

“As digital platforms evolve, strategies are also evolving to communicate emotion,” Godard says. “We saw that early on with emoticons (precursors to emojis), but emojis have largely taken over that role of facilitating emotional communication. At the same time, research on emojis has lagged behind actual use. Researchers don’t have enough tools for measuring the way people use emojis and the emotions that they communicate.”

While it may be easy to cast off emojis as simple distractions, they belie a hidden language—especially among young people—Godard says. And any researcher studying digital communication will have to account for the emotional information an emoji contains to get a true accounting of the message.

Godard’s MLE can help researchers crack that coded language and the emotions behind it beyond simple negativity and positivity.

Godard analyzed three million Twitter posts and collected emotion ratings of emojis from 2,230 human raters to develop and validate the MLE.

This new lexicon consists of 359 common emojis rated on eight emotions (anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, and trust) and the two broader sentiments (positive and negative).

“A substantial amount of online communication now includes emojis,” says Holtzman, who supervised the findings. “From market to mental health research, we hope this new tool will help everyone better understand the emotions of people communicating online.”

Godard saw the need for the MLE because human communication is changing and growing so rapidly. More people are writing at a higher rate than at any time in history, but often in short bursts through social media, email or text message. When people speak face to face, they see emotional cues that help translate emotions. When people write letters, they have the luxury of letting the words explain the emotions over paragraphs. In tweets, there are 280 characters.

But people tweet a lot, and much of that is in the public domain. It’s a tantalizing opportunity to study communication, and Godard’s lexicon can help translate. Godard is continuing her PhD at UBCO, and will monitor how useful her MLE remains. She understands the research will need to be updated to keep pace with the quickly changing world of digital communication.

“We know that the meanings of emojis change over time,” says Godard. “We also know how subtle teens can be, in their text messages for example, and how they tend to gravitate toward what’s new.”

The post Emo-jional rescue: UBCO researchers create tool to measure the emotion in emojis appeared first on UBC Okanagan News.