We spend most of our time indoors exposed to a variety of organic and inorganic compounds. Accounting for and minimizing potentially harmful exposures is critical to indoor air quality. Through this course, students will gain new knowledge in the field of indoor air quality and develop skills to engineer solutions to create healthy, sustainable and equitable indoor environments. Focus will be given to moisture transport through materials, water activity, the impact of moisture on organic indoor contaminants such as bioaerosols, and methodologies to prevent, remediate and monitor indoor mould growth. Further, this course will investigate tools, such as next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics, used to characterize indoor microbiomes and bioaerosols. Interest will also be given to issues in indoor environmental quality specifically in Indigenous housing as well as low-socioeconomic communities in Canada. Through a course project, students will engineer a solution using resources and skills developed throughout the course for a particular issue of interest in indoor air quality.

This course is to develop students' in-depth understanding on the management of construction workforce. Specifically, this course will tackle worker safety and ergonomics, a chronic problem of the construction industry, teaching a range of theories, practices, and potential smart technologies for the management of worker safety and ergonomics (e.g., unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), proximity sensor, inertial measurement unit (IMU), computer vision, and deep neural network (DNN)). Topics discussed include: 1) introduction to construction workers, trades, and unions; 2) fundamentals on construction labour laws, regulations, and insurances; 3) accident and ergonomics theories; 4) onsite measures for safety and ergonomics management; and 5) advanced sensing technologies for automated safety monitoring.

Civil Engineering is the oldest branch of engineering. In ancient times, architects, engineers, and planners were one and the same. In landscape design, these three disciplines are still closely linked particularly in the design and construction of green infrastructure, low impact develop and stormwater infrastructure. In this course the design of stormwater management systems will be taught with a multi-disciplinary approach. Impacts to the flow regime, water balances, flow paths, water quality, and aquatic habitats will be discussed. The low impact development (LID) design approach will be examined as a tool for sustainable urban planning. Some topics covered in this course include: Conventional systems (stormwater management ponds); Vegetated stormwater systems (green roofs, bioretention); Infiltration systems (permeable pavements, exfiltration cells; Treatment systems (oil-grit separators, filter strips); Modelling approaches; Sediment and erosion control and operational considerations.

Water resources systems are physically complex and the solution of appropriate mathematical models is computationally demanding. This course considers physical processes in water resource systems, their mathematical representation and numerical solutions. Newton's 2nd law and the equations of mass and energy conservation are developed and applied to closed-conduit, open-channel, and groundwater flow problems. Procedures for efficient numerical solution of the governing equations are presented. Problems of non-linearity, sensitivity to data and computational complexity are introduced.

Engineers face growing pressure to incorporate sustainability objectives into their practice. In comparing two products/designs it is often not apparent which one is more sustainable. The course introduces concepts and methods for sustainability assessment. The course primarily focuses on Life Cycle Assessment as it is viewed as being a necessary component of any assessment. This is a research based course and is suitable for students interested in researching in depth a particular topic. By the end of the course, students will have an awareness of analytical tools/resources for evaluating sustainability implications employing a systems perspective, and have applied these tools in a research project. This course assumes students have a background in engineering and have taken a course in engineering economics. 2 lecture hours per week.

Theory and application of physical and chemical operations and processes for the treatment of water and wastewater. Specific processes covered include sedimentation, coagulation, filtration, and disinfection, with an overview of reactor theory. Laboratory experiments are designed to support and demonstrate the lecture material. It is expected that students have taken a previous undergraduate level course in basic water/wastewater treatment.

Theory and application of physical and chemical operations and processes for the treatment of water and wastewater. Specific processes covered include sedimentation, coagulation, filtration, and disinfection, with an overview of reactor theory. Laboratory experiments are designed to support and demonstrate the lecture material.

This course covers sustainability issues as they apply to the provision of safe drinking water. Water reclamation and reuse topics focus on strategies that allow wastewater to be treated for indirect potable reuse as well as many other purposes. Other major topics include: risk assessment associated with emerging pathogens and chemical constituents present in source waters, advanced drinking water treatment processes including membranes (UF, NF, and RO), advanced oxidation and activated carbon. Throughout the course, case studies, application examples and numerical problems will be presented.

This course deals with the major chemical processes occurring in aqueous environments, in both natural systems and treatment systems. The topics covered include: chemical thermodynamics and kinetics; acid/base chemistry; quantitative equilibrium calculations; acid-base titrations; dissolved CO2 chemistry; mineral solution chemistry; complexation; redox reactions; and the solid-solution interface. The lectures are complemented by laboratory experiments in which students learn some of the standard analysis techniques of aquatic chemistry.

Contaminants in indoor air have enormous impact on human health, productivity, building energy use, and sustainability. This course focuses on important contaminants, fundamental tools, and methodologies to measure and model the indoor environment, and on engineering solutions to improve indoor air quality. The course covers a rationale and motivation for the investigation of indoor contaminants, important contaminants and sources, the use of mass balances to assess indoor concentrations, fundamental transport and transformation processes that occur indoors, indoor exposure assessment, and methodologies to assess costs and benefits for technologies and techniques to improve indoor air. The course explicitly links the air inside of buildings to building materials, energy use, outdoor air quality, and human health.

The next 15 years will see major changes in the global infrastructure system. To meet local, national, and international sustainability goals, this next generation of infrastructure must be planned, designed, and built in new ways. Large scale infrastructure projects have impacts well beyond their stated primary purpose: they consume significant amounts of natural resources and, once built, change how we live, work and move. As key players in planning, designing, constructing, and commissioning large infrastructure projects, engineers have a special responsibility to understand the myriad ways infrastructure interacts with our natural and social systems. This course will explore what sustainability means in the context of infrastructure development, examine infrastructure needs and sustainability at the global and project scale, and provide students with skills and techniques to have an impact on infrastructure sustainability in their future work. At the end of this course, students will be able to think critically about the wider impacts of large-scale infrastructure projects and use this knowledge alongside their technical engineering skills to develop better outcomes. Students will learn approaches and skills for analysing (and influencing) the sustainability of infrastructure systems at the project and system scale.

This course introduces students to core principles and quantitative methods to provide support for making 'hard' decisions, and communicating results. Topics include structured decision-making techniques (e.g., decision trees), public sector decision making (e.g., benefit-cost analysis, welfare economics), multi-criteria decision-making, and decision making under uncertainty (e.g., sensitivity analysis, Monte Carlo simulation, utility theory, and risk attitudes).

This course will provide an overview of climate science before examining the technical, economic and political realities of potential climate change interventions across six major climate sectors. These range from energy to industry to farming and forestry. Students will apply this knowledge both via individual study efforts and by a group project tasked with setting a pathway to net zero for a chosen country.

This course is a core course to support the Centre for Climate Science and Engineering. It is intended to provide a technical overview of greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation, especially as related to large civil systems (energy, transportation, buildings) as well strategies as industry and fuel extraction. A second course, focused on climate adaptation has also been developed, and is currently being revamped prior to applying for a permanent code. The two courses together are intended to work in conjunction to fill important gaps in engineering education related to managing climate change.

This course is unique in its focus on system-wide GHG emission pathways and scientifically informed GHG reduction targets, along with its analysis of a wide range of technological solutions and their interactions. While the course contains a significant technical component, climate change mitigation requires a more complete understanding of the policy and political context, which is often lacking from other engineering courses. This course will thus adopt an interdisciplinary approach — focused on engineering, but integrating broader insights necessary to educate engineers with a systems-level understanding of climate change strategies.

This course focuses on water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) in low-income settings from an engineering and environmental health perspective. With respect to water, the course will cover drinking water quality and quantity, water access, and appropriate water treatment and storage options. The course will cover aspects of sanitation promotion, sanitation in challenging environments, and fecal sludge management. Hygiene topics will include disease transmission, handwashing station design, and theory and practice of hygiene behaviour, education and behaviour change. Local and national governance in WASH will also be explored

Global engineering projects often fail because they do not account for how and why people change their behaviours and habits. Understanding and changing habits can improve health and wellbeing globally and locally (e.g., preventing bullying, increasing handwashing, ending open defecation). Similarly, creating habits can cause technologies to scale rapidly and profitably (e.g., smart phones, fidget spinners).

To understand how and why humans change their habits and/or behaviour, this course draws on theories from health sciences, social sciences, and behavioural economics. Case studies will focus primarily on successful and unsuccessful examples of behavior change projects in the international development sector. Case study and theory readings will form the foundation for weekly seminar discussions.

In a hands-on, independent design project, students will learn how hard changing habits can be when they try to change one of their own habits and build a sensor to measure if their habit changes. This course will leave students with a deepened understanding of how hard it can be to change humans’ habits and of the promise and limitations of sensors and technology in global engineering and health.

The course will begin with the basics of climate science and carbon cycles, coupled with an understanding of Earth's natural energy budget and balance. Students will evaluate Canada and the world's carbon budgets, before focusing on key Canadian GHG generation sectors that this course is targeting: fossil fuel production, transportation, energy generation and delivery, buildings, efficiency, industry, farming, forestry and soils, all aligning with our current GHG footprint. There will be a review of the history and functioning of primary and secondary energy generation and distribution systems. Students will study both the potential for disruption and mitigation strategies necessary for the mass adoption of intermittent generation, the electrification of heating and the elimination of carbon from transportation in particular. Energy storage will be a key part of this review. Buildings will be considered — both for the potential efficiency gains to be achieved and for technological changes to displace fossil fuel consumption.

We will consider where Canada’s largest industrial emitters must move to in order to eliminate their carbon contributions, recognizing the transitional role of cement, iron and steel, fossil fuels and the existing economic systems that rely on them. Hydrogen’s potential role will be considered, alongside carbon capture and storage. Finally, students will consider farming and forestry as potential carbon sequestration interventions. Each of these broad areas will be viewed through multiple lenses: policy, political, economic, environmental, financial, technical.

This course is designed to provide students with the necessary knowledge and skills to develop, implement and interpret numerical models for geotechnical engineering problems. The course will cover the theoretical background of numerical modelling techniques, including finite element method (FEM), finite difference method (FDM), and boundary element method (BEM), and their application to geotechnical problems such as soil mechanics, foundation engineering, slope stability, and underground excavation. The course will also emphasize on the importance of model verification and validation, and will provide students with practical skills in software applications and programming for numerical modelling.

This course addresses practical considerations in the analysis and design of surface and underground excavations in rock. Topics covered include: Practical Rock Engineering Problems; Rock Mass Characterization; Rock Mass Classification; Rock Mass Failure Mechanisms; The Art of Rock Engineering Design; Ground Support Technology; Tunneling in Rock; Long Term Performance of Excavations; Forensic Investigations; Case Studies in Rock Slope Engineering; Underground Excavations in Rock and Deep and High Stress Conditions.

The fundamental concepts of soil mechanics and foundation engineering presented at the undergraduate level will be further developed in the context of advanced topics including: undrained loading and soil liquefaction; coupled hydro-mechanical modeling using Biot theory; cemented soils; unsaturated soil mechanics; constitutive models and laboratory test methods; and field monitoring techniques. Extensive reading assignments will be given. Research papers, numerical modeling assignments, and class presentations will be used as the basis for evaluation.

Fundamental theories and applications of response and failure of engineering materials (e.g., rocks, concretes, steels, polymers, and glass) under highly dynamic loading. Topics include elastic and plastic stress wave propagation, failure and fracture theory under rapidly varying loads, dynamic fracture toughness, nucleation, and propagation of the damage in materials and their theoretical and experimental quantification.

Lectures will be supplemented by selected laboratory exercises involving the newly built state-of-the-art Split Hopkinson Pressure Bar facilities, to illustrate the physics of dynamic loading, strain-rate effects, and high-velocity fracture in engineering materials.

This course is designed for graduate students who are interested in learning how solid materials such as steel, soil, and rock respond to loading and deformation. Constitutive models are mathematical constructs founded on fundamental mechanics that relate loads and deformations through various components of stresses and strains. Students will learn how to use tensors to describe stresses and strains in 3D space, what various loading conditions solids may experience, how solid materials respond to loading by elastic and plastic deformations, and how presence of other material phases such as fluids may contribute to material behaviour.

The course includes three main sections: First a summary of some continuum mechanics concepts including tensor notation and operations, deformation gradient, strain and stress tensors, principal vectors, and invariants will be explained. Then basic concepts from plasticity including definitions of elastic and plastic strains, yielding, hardening, coaxially, normality and flow rule will be introduced. The final and most extensive part of the course includes going through a range of constitutive relations starting with classic elasto-plastic models and moving on to classic and advanced critical state and bounding surface plasticity models. Materials will be general in nature, but examples and some of the specific models will focus on soil behaviour. The course will be useful to all students who are studying Geomechanics, and those Structural Engineering students who are interested in modelling material behaviour, or soil-structure interaction.

Rock masses can be defined as made of intact rock blocks and discontinuities (joints, faults, etc.). It is the presence of those weak features that determine the overall hydro-mechanical response of the rock mass that engineers observe in the field. Therefore, to correctly engineer any structure in rock, we cannot relay only on the mechanical properties of the intact rock, but we need to be able to properly understand the role that fractures play on the overall behaviour that we observe, and how to account for them during the different phases of the rock engineering design.

This course will try to address this specific issue by presenting the latest scientific discoveries and engineering approaches in the field. It will also present students with innovative methodologies for the quantification of fracture shear strength, rock mass mapping, and rock mass modeling tools such as the Combined Finite-Discrete Element Method for simulating damage and fracture in geomaterials.

All geotechnical engineers will at some time in their careers be involved with projects that includes elements of rock mechanics or rock engineering (in general, rock in Toronto is only about 15m or less below ground surface). This introductory graduate-level course is aimed at students who have studied soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering at undergraduate level, and who wish to expand their knowledge to include a fundamental understanding of rock mechanics and rock engineering. The course covers fundamental components of rock mechanics (in situ stress, discontinuities, intact rock, rock masses, heterogeneity) before moving on to rock engineering topics (rock excavation and stabilization, foundations and slopes, underground excavations). The course uses an inverted classroom model: material is delivered asynchronously via video lectures, with all in-person sessions being devoted to tutorials and other problem-solving activities. Various workshops and laboratory sessions are included.

Modern engineering design codes embrace reliability-based design, and this philosophy is being introduced into geotechnical engineering. However, the application of RBD to rock engineering is not straightforward. Drawing on the instructor's unique close involvement in the ongoing development of Eurocode 7, this course presents the latest understanding and developments in RBD for rock engineering. The following topics are included: rationale for RBD; computing the probability of failure; simple examples of RBD; application of FORM to rock engineering problems; the problem of limited data; the problem of non-probabilistic uncertainty. Course delivery is via in-person tutorials supported by directed reading and problem-solving.

This course addresses the fundamentals and practical considerations of reinforcement and support for surface and underground excavations in rock. Topics covered include: Rock mass behaviour and failure mechanisms; Ground support elements and specifications; Ground support "action" and "reaction"; Ground support practice; Data required for support system design; Approaches to ground support design: analytical, empirical, numerical modelling, probabilistic; Monitoring of reinforcement and support; Case studies.

This course will provide students with the foundation for an understanding of geology as it applies to civil/geotechnical engineering in urban areas. Topics include the role and importance of geology in civil/geotechnical engineering practice, including glacial geology and landforms, hydrogeology, urban geology of Canadian cities, and case studies with practical applications. This course will not address mining, mineral, or rock engineering.

A lecture and tutorial course designed to build on the prerequisite introduction to probability in the form of applied probability and statistics with emphasis on techniques appropriate for investigating the random behaviour of complex civil engineering systems. Topics include: a review of probability theory; extreme value distributions; engineering reliability; conditional distributions; applications of common probability models; parameter estimation and confidence intervals; significance testing; elementary Bayesian analysis; simple stochastic processes.