March 29th Non-Mentor Meeting

After a nice long spring break, everyone is back and ready to go! At our non-mentor meeting on Tuesday, we covered meeting times for next semester (it seems like most of our time is spent discussing when to meet!) and went over our thesis parts. The thesis sections are coming together nicely and it is a huge relief to have part of it done (only 136,234 pages to go!).

We also discussed WHO standards for vaccine carriers. WHO dictates that how large ice packs need to be in cold boxes, but since we're not using ice packs we hope that we can get permission to bypass that standard.

Young put in the order for probes and we calculated that we are just within our budget for this semester. We still need to register for Unite for Sight and prepare our presentation for the conference. After discussing these topics, we broke into sub-teams and worked on our goals.

28 days to Undergraduate Research Day and counting,

Amina

St Patrick's Day Mentor Meeting

Wow. Apologies to the team for this missing post. I was almost sure I had posted it on the Friday before break on my way to New York, but Bolt Bus's Wifi can be finnicky. I hope everyone had a great spring break and was able to find their parts of the outline of the thesis paper in the google doc where the previous less detailed outline was.

Minutes from March 17 meeting.

Jason informed the team that the letter to Dr. Wallace detailing our grant expenditure was in, and we have since been approved to use our funds to send 3 of our members to the Unite For Sight Conference at Yale in April.

The Materials for Construction sub-team detailed their assumption in ordering materials for the initial prototype construction. The initial model will have 1 cubic foot of storage space and therefore be on the larger side of WHO prescribed cold boxes. It will be assembled from styrofoam insulation sheets, polycarbonate glass and corrugated plastic. Some questions remain on the best way to attach these parts together, and Dr. Shah suggested there are some pretty handy guys hanging out in machine shops around campus that will usually answer a quick question about these things.

The marketing team gave an update on the first three sections of the marketing plan template which are Goals, Objectives, and Audience. There was some discussion about this. I suggested that the Audience should specified as two parties: users and customers; the users are the health workers in the rural health clinics and the customer is most likely an employee or committee at UNICEF.

The rest of the meeting was spent outlining the first 3 parts of our Thesis and splitting up parts among the team. The resulting outline is available in the "NSF Proposal Assignments" google doc.

-Matt

Non-Mentor Meeting March 15

Before breaking out into sub-teams at our non-mentor meeting Tuesday night, we had to sort out together one team goal of utmost importance to our success: how to schedule our meeting next semester without having to meet at 8 AM, as we have the previous two falls. For some reason our when2meet crashed, so Divya created a new doodle which everyone is supposed to fill out by the mentor meeting today. As of now there are 6 non-8 AM spots left!

In other news, we are sorting our financial matters with gemstone for the Unite for Sight conference, preparing slides for the conference due March 1st and preparing our Undergraduate research day poster by March 28th. The Finite Element Team promises some real snazzy pictures by the end of spring break.

After that we broke into sub-teams, for which I can only account for my own and the few teams I eavesdropped on. Kelly and I talked over meeting our goal for Finite Element Analysis this week, which is to have a working phase change model in 3-D. We're also trying to figure out how to sample specific points in the 3-D model space and track their temperature over time (i.e. simulate the experimental team's thermocouple leads.) This is important in meeting our goal of matching the simulation to experiment.

Veena, Amanda, Quint and I had a good conversation towards the end of the meeting about how our current design is implemented, which is a conversation we use to have very often in the previous incarnations of our design but haven't had in detail with this new concept. We suggested that there will be more boxes than PCM packs, and the PCM packs will be the only part that ever goes in a freezer. When it reaches each successive point in the cold chain, the ice packs can be replaced with previously frozen PCM packs and sent on its way or stored. When it reaches its final point of the cold chain, it serves as storage. If the final destination has some kind of freezer, the PCM packs could be cycled indefinitely. In a perfect world, once the vaccines were used up the clinic would send the box and a set of spent PCM packs back to the main distribution center, but there's no reason one clinic couldn't have more than one box at a time.

From what I heard in the rest of the room, the construction team was having some intense conversation over which plastics were best/easiest to work with/cheapest/lightest/most durable as they got together the materials list for a prototype for their goal this week.

-Matt

March 10th Mentor Meeting

We used our March 10^th mentor meeting to bring the team update on goals for the rest of the semester. We got updates from the Gemstone staff from our team liaison mainly regarding Undergraduate Research Day and the new location in the colony ballroom. The team also filled out a Gemstone program and mentor survey. Afterwards, we developed a new list of goals and due dates according to subgroup. The Marketing subgroup hopes to get at least 2 sections of the marketing plan drafted each week with an entire marketing plan draft complete by the end of the semester. The PCM subgroup plans to acquire and test AcuTemp and to complete testing of the Greenbox by the end of the month. PCM also hopes to have 2 new PCMs tested by the end of the semester. The Finite Elements subgroup is gradually working towards matching the theoretical models with results from the ice box experiments. They hope to develop a working 3D model of our box with ice and PCM as well as another model 3D model with ice and insulation by the end of the month. Initial comparisons between the models and ice box experiments are scheduled to be completed by the beginning of April while all modeling and ice box experiments comparisons are scheduled to be completed by the end of the semester. The construction team hopes to have materials ordered by the 15^th of March with the prototype sized by the 17^th. Brainstorming and research into the fabrication process of the prototype should be completed by the end of March and all relevant materials are scheduled to be assembled by the end of the semester. Finally, the Experimental Physical Testing subgroup plans to have all experiments proposed within the NSF proposal completed by the end of the semester while the Proposal subgroup is working on getting chapters 1 through 3 of our Gemstone thesis completed. The schedule is ambitious but the team is doing great at following it so far!

-Amanda

March 8th Nonmentor Meeting

During our nonmentor meeting, we discussed some overall group matters for a short while before breaking off into our subgroups. First, we need to decide our meeting times for next semester, so Veena created a when2meet for us to fill out. We also assigned times for Undergraduate Research Day, so people will be present throughout the entire event and poster session. Additionally, we created a strikeforce to create the poster with all our latest research for the event. After these major group matters, we split up to work on individual tasks. The building team researched materials to order, and the Icebox/PCM team put in the order for the new thermocouple and probes. At the end, we further detailed who would be writing the different parts for the thesis.

-Sahil

March 3rd Mentor Meeting

This week during our mentor meeting, we had an update presentation from every subgroup in order to get everyone up to speed.
Before we started this, we had some important news updates: Amina was going to sign us up for Undergraduate Research Day, and our abstract was accepted by the Unite for Sight Conference! Going to this conference in Connecticut would be Ravi, Kelly, and Amanda. They will have a 5 minute presentation, followed by 5 minutes of Q&A. This will be our team's first presentation outside of the gemstone department, so we are all excited for feedback from the global health community.

For the subgroup presentations, the PCM/Icebox team has decided on a new, 8 probe thermocouple to order, since the current one is malfunctioning too often. Additionally, they have an outline of dates to measure and test the 2 additional PCMs that we have acquired. The Computer Simulation Team has decided on a new way to model phase changes on COMSOL, which simplifies the 0 degree temperature change as a very slight temperature increase in order to make the program easier to work with. They hope to integrate this into the current model system soon. The Building and Design team presented a theoretical design for the ice box, and will continue to tweak this as necessary. They are currently going to acquire materials to build a rough pre-prototype. The Marketing team did a lot of research into alternative uses for this cold chain besides vaccines. Some possible uses are food, other pharmaceutical supplies, blood, and even organ transport. As a team, we hope to have our first three chapters of our proposal written by spring break. Our updates were very informative, and gives us clearer goals to work towards for the end of the semester.

-Sahil