The Big Drive - 05/05/2016
Today, the fourth day of the studytrip, we had an early rise. This was not because of an morning gymnastics class, but because of the long drive that we had to make. We were going to visit the University of Waterloo, which is a 1.5 hour drive from Toronto. In Canadian terms this is peanuts, but we as Dutch people aren't used to driving so far. I guess it is something we have to get used to the coming weeks. So we took a quick breakfast at the hostel and we drove off. After fighting the morning traffic jams on what was described as one of the busiest highways on the American continent, we arrived at the university of Waterloo.
We were being guided by a very enthousiastic girl who told us everything we wanted to know. During the tour across the different buildings we had a tour of the high voltage lab. They had 5 different high voltage experimental setups. After some introduction to the several machines we got an demo of a dielectric test. A thin plate of plexiglass was placed between an increasing electric field and ground. When the voltage comes above a certain point a wonderfull effect apeared. A lighting kind of discharge can be seen on the surface of the plexiglass plate. When the maximum voltage of 150kV was reached, the full surface was covered.
Beside the high voltage lab, some more research groups were visited to find out about their current research. Among them was the Waterloo Autonomous Vehichle Experience (WAVE), where research regarding drones and other selfdriving mechatronic devices is conducted. Also, there the student development space, where student teams of for example the World Solar Challenge and Concrete Canoe Challenge had their own garage unit. This way they had their own space to work in with all tools available to them.
After a quick lunch we had to drive to our next destination: Velocity Startups. Velocity is a non-profit organisation connected to the University of Waterloo that gives spin offs from the university the chance to develop their ideas into a comercial product. It basically functions as a incubator and gives the start ups an office space to work in, mentoring and help with funding. We got a tour of their garage as they called it. This is a shared office space where all the companies have several desks for theirselfves. There were also some small closed offices, where people could work in silence or could have (video) meetings. There about 65 companies based in Velocity, each consisting of 2 to 5 people.
When we were finished at Velocity, we had to drive te long road back to toronto. Guess what? There was a enormous traffic jam. Two and a half hours later we arrived back at the hostel and we went for a group dinner at a typical Canadian restaurant. There were burgers, spareribs, poutinne and of course baseball and basketball on the restaurant tv's. Combined with some drinks it was a very "gezellig" night out!
By: Teun Hulman