Federal funding helping Lambton College gear up more research

Lambton College has been granted more than $1.8 million in federal funds to purchase new equipment for applied research into storing energy and turning waste into something valuable.

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The grants come from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, an independent corporation created by the federal government to strengthen research capacity at universities, colleges, hospitals and non-profit institutions.

“This funding will not only allow us to expand collaborative applied research projects with industry but also create a conductive teaching environment for training highly qualified personnel in growing cleantech sectors,” Mehdi Sheikhzadeh, the college’s senior vice-president of research and innovation, said in a news release.

“Our students will gain invaluable real-life experience working alongside industry partners,” he said.

Lambton is the only college to have ranked among the Top 5 research colleges in the past seven years and it has attracted more than $20 million in research income in the last five years.

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In a 2022 ranking, Lambton was the third top college for research in Canada and second in Ontario.

Sarnia College was recently approved for $965,000 from the foundation for equipment for electrical energy storage research and $880,000 for equipment supporting research into waste valorization – the process of converting waste into valuable products.

The new funding will “allow us to branch into these specific areas more than we are now,” said Steve Reaume, Lambton’s director of research and innovation.

“We have a base in these two areas and this equipment will allow us to really go forward with the research” along with business partners, he said. “That’s the focus of college applied collaborative research.”

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The new equipment will be added to the college’s electrical energy and storage lab and split between a bio-pilot lab and a materials processing lab, Reaume said.

Lambton has 20 labs at its main campus and nearly at the Western Sarnia-Lambton Research Park, as well as two research pilot plant areas, the college said.

“The last two years we’ve actually been very successful” with applications for funding to add research equipment, Reaume said.

“We’ve now gotten five of these grants in two years for almost $10 million,” he said. “I think it shows the need for this type of research.”

Lambton College serves as “a research accelerator for businesses,” Reaume said. “We are here to help businesses grow and create jobs and create revenue for the local economy.”

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The college has been involved in electrical energy storage and production since 2015 and the move into valorization came as an “off shoot” of the college’s industrial materials development research, Reaume said.

Valorization “is extracting value from what we consider either waste product” or “a by-product,” he said.

“The goal is to turn organic waste, waste you would get from food trimmings, or agricultural waste” into “either high-value chemicals or materials.”

It also involves “reworking plastic into something that can be utilized for 3D printing or packaging material, stuff like that,” Reaume said.

The aim is to create something using waste that has enough value “it actually makes money when you collect it, process it and then turn it into the new product,” he said.

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“With material production, material use, you have a lot of waste,” Reaume said.

That’s also the case with the college’s bio-industrial research into producing bio-fuels and bio-chemicals which produce organic or agricultural waste, Reaume said.

“There are companies out there looking to utilize this cheap material that can then be worked into something,” he said.

The college’s research involves several forms of energy storage, with batteries being the most common, Reaume said.

“A lot of this is actually producing and testing the batteries,” he said.

“We’re looking at making new types of batteries. . . new advanced batteries with different materials, different metals,” with the aim of having a variety of battery types available, Reaume said.

“When you rely on one resource too much, you can get shortages, prices can go up,” he said.

The college’s research also involves other types of energy storage, including solar ovens and “storing energy as compressed gas,” in underground salt caverns until it’s needed, Reaume said.

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