New iCentre is an 'eyepopper'

he Calgary Centre for Innovative Technology (CCIT) can now virtually transport engineers, scientists and students to the bottom of ocean floors, inside oil and gas reservoirs and other inaccessible places, including knee joints and hearts.

The CCIT’s impressive new Schlumberger iCentre opened on June 6. The lab houses four large, movable screens that project computer-generated 3-D images. These detailed 3-D visualizations provide U of C researchers, students and their industry colleagues with new opportunities for working shoulder-to-shoulder to solve complex problems.

The impressive $15-million lab was funded by a public and private-sector partnership, which included the federal and provincial governments and Schlumberger, the global oilfield and information services company.

At the lab’s opening ceremonies, U of C engineering dean Chan Wirasinghe said the lab symbolizes the multidisciplinary and collaborative philosophy of the CCIT.

For example, the iCentre allows engineers, geologists, geophysicists and other scientists to work together and with common data in one environment to explore how to drill wells more efficiently, create reservoir simulations and more.

In a lab demo, Schlumberger representative Kevin Bradford took the audience 16,000 feet below the North Sea. The interactive technology allowed Bradford to ‘peek’ behind fault lines and look underneath the ocean’s floor to study the efficiency of well trajectories given geological data.

Offshore wells cost anywhere between $20 million to $200 million, so using the best decision-making tools available is crucial, says U of C chemical and petroleum engineering professor Raj Mehta, one of several U of C energy experts whose research will benefit from the new lab.

The Schlumberger iCentre will also open new doors of perception for researchers from other disciplines.For example, bioengi-neers can create 3-D images of knee joints or study MRI data to develop improved surgical procedures and devices.

s well, manufacturing researchers will be able to create 3-D images of prototypes.

In February 2002, the U of C Faculty of Medicine and Sun Microsystems also launched a 3-D visualization lab for bioinformatics research. This lab provides U of C health researchers with new perspectives on the human genome sequence, cell structures and the composition of proteins and DNA.

The CCIT provides space and equipment for U of C engineering professors and their students to work on teams with their colleagues from industry and other disciplines. The research teams are working to find solutions for problems facing society and industry in five key areas: Resource Development and Utilization, Environmental Impact, Health of the Aging Population, Deteriorating Infrastructure and Next-Generation Intelligent Technologies.