Bill Bialkowski

Bill Bialkowski – B.Eng., MASc., P.Eng., FCAE

Bill is a Professional Engineer and was elected a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Academy_of_Engineering) in 1992.

He was born in Poland in 1940 (legal name is Wojciech Ludwik Bialkowski.) and was educated in England and Canada. His engineering specialty is the field of stability and control, and has applied mathematical models to solving stability and control problems in many systems, the majority of which were hydraulic in nature.

His first design and model challenge came in 1965 (55 years ago) and involved the hydraulic drag of new Canadian Navy sonar equipment. His Masters of engineering thesis involved the stability and hydraulic control of the Canadian Navy’s stte-of-the-art  FHE-400 hydrofoil ship (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMCS_Bras_d’Or_(FHE_400)). This required a thorough education in hydraulic principles. 

Over the next 20 years he designed, installed and commissioned computer control systems in pulp and paper mills around the world and became familiar with the intricate hydraulics of the paper making process and how to control its internal instabilities for better paper uniformity and customer satisfaction. In 1984 he founded EnTech Control Engineering Inc. a company which gained a world-wide reputation for stabilizing pulp and paper mill operations. Its success resulted in EnTech being acquired by Emerson of St. Louis, MO, USA, a world leader in process automation.

Bill has contributed to the control engineering discipline by co-authoring several text books, hand books, international performance standards, many papers and the teaching of hundreds of process control engineers. He was named control engineer of the year in 1997 in Los Angeles and was granted the 2001 Pioneer Award by the US Pulp & Paper Industry.

Bill sold his company and retired in 2003, only to be found by Mary Muter, then of the Georgian Bay Association, who was trying to understand why water levels on Georgian Bay were so low. Our early work modeling the St. Clair River led to the commissioning of Baird and Associates, and the Baird Report of 2005, which uncovered previously unknown erosion in the St. Clair River. Bill’s early models were also presented to David Fay, then of Environment Canada (later IJC Canadian Section). David Fay provided Bill with the hydraulic equations relating to connecting channel flows, which in turn allowed Bill to build an accurate hydraulic routing model of the whole Great Lakes basin. In 2017, Bill’s model was presented at IAGLR 2017 (International Association of Great Lakes Researchers) in Detroit. This was followed by designs of hydraulic structures to mitigate both extreme low and high-water levels. All of these designs and models have been shared with the International Joint Commission, and the USA Army Corps of Engineers.

Links to Research Papers:

A Review of Options for Tackling The Water Level Issue