Roun beauty partnered with Lambton College on an applied research project involving the production of hair-weaving products with banana fibres. Roun is looking to make an environmentally friendly and sustainable personal care product to replace existing synthetic weaving products.

Lambton College has developed and refined facile, environmentally friendly techniques for degumming (removing non-cellulosic material), softening, and dyeing banana fibres for use in hair extensions. The team has also studied the desired properties of hair weaving products such as length, texture, strength, shedding, degradability etc.

This project successfully achieved its goals with banana fibres being successfully degummed, enabling them to be dyed and treated. Importantly, the processing methods also increase tensile strength characteristic of the natural fibre. As a result, the treated fibres now exhibit enhanced flexibility and reduced brittleness, making them less susceptible to breakage during weaving or combing activities. This breakthrough paves the way for the creation of high-quality, durable hair extensions from sustainable banana fibres.

Graphene is a new and versatile carbon-based nanomaterial yielding tremendous benefits in graphene reinforced polymer composites' mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties. Universal Matter Inc. (UMI) has recently developed a novel "Flash Joule Heating (FJH)" process to produce high-quality, sustainable graphene from waste carbon feedstocks, such as recycled plastics and waste biomass.

This project focuses on the validation and process optimization of turbostratic graphene reinforced plastics (both thermoset and thermoplastic carriers) using Lambton College's pilot extrusion facilities. This work will lead to the development of a family of new high strength grade plastics designed for industrial-scale real world applications.

Universal Matter Inc (UMI) has recently developed a novel “Flash Joule Heating (FJH)” process to produce high-quality sustainable turbostratic graphene. In this project, Lambton College has been utilizing UMI’s graphene materials for formulation development and pilot scale production of graphene reinforced plastic composites with enhanced nanoparticles distribution and thermo-mechanical properties. Scale up polymer processing has been carried out by leveraging Lambton’s multiple twin screw extrusion capability, large scale processing facilities, and polymer testing equipment. For each of the formulation development various process parameters including screw design, temperature profile, mixing ratio are optimized to ensure that high quality homogeneous graphene dispersion in the polymer networks and desired performance of the products.

Masco Canada Limited is a leader in designing, manufacturing and distributing branded home improvement and building products. Masco Canada has taken pride in offering a collection of brands focused on delivering innovative water solutions to the building and home improvement market for more than 100 years. 

Masco Canada Limited and Lambton College have partnered to address some challenges they have faced in product development and manufacturing. The first proposed applied research activities to be conducted during this project will focus on new product development concerning process efficiency using advanced tools like FEM/CFD simulation. The next challenge to be addressed will be reducing manufacturing steps by exploring manufacturing. 

The overall goal of this project will be to support prototyping, selection of new material and process improvements. Masco Canada will increase revenue while lowering costs for the development of new and improved products, and improved processes. This will allow for future growth and job creation.

Garnet Orthopedic Solutions provides a wide range of services and products, such as assessing gait patterns, posture, and foot health to fabricate custom orthotics while also correcting lower body kinetic chain deficiencies and reducing the overall strain on an individual's body and joints with their custom foot orthotics.

The Lambton College team worked with Garnet to optimize a 3D-printed design and produce optimized prototypes. The team then identified the correct material formulation for the design function and molding capability. Lambton College developed 3Dprinted molds required for the footwear in one size. Once the molds were produced, the molding process for the production of injection molded parts was developed, producing functional parts out of the chosen material formulation.

Further molds and mold processing for other shoe sizes will be developed. The outsole parts from the injection molds will be used to create functional shoes. Those shoes will be used to conduct studies to determine the effectiveness of the design.

The project’s overall goal is to develop an injection molding process to produce the shoe and outsole, along with the various corrective outsole attachments, a patient will need throughout recovery.

Headquartered in Peterborough, Ontario, Quickmill Inc. manufactures a line of CNC gantry and bridge type machining centers. Incorporated in 1984, Quickmill began by selling vertical drilling machines, with conversational software developed by owner/inventor David Piggott, to machine shops in North America.  Quickmill is one of the few thriving North American made CNC Machine tool builders with the majority of components sourced from North American vendors. Today, Quickmill has expanded its engineering and manufacturing capabilities to offer a diverse line of high-quality CNC Machine tools that meet the ever-expanding needs of global market place.

The goal of this project is to monitor the condition of critical CNC machine components and provide the operator with advanced notice if a part requires service. This will provide operators the opportunity to schedule downtime for machine maintenance before a costly and time-consuming failure occurs. Specifically, during a standard motion profile, condition monitoring will be performed using accelerometers to measure vibrations in target components. With the assistance of machine learning algorithms, vibration profiles will be analyzed and compared to determine each component’s condition and remaining useful life.

Success of the project will result in software development and integration of developed machine learning algorithms into Quickmill’s CNC machines.