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