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