Background
There are many substances that must be kept cold in a hospital. Vaccines are the best known. For this reason, most health care facilities have at least one refrigerator. However, these cold boxes are typically concentrated in one part of the hospital, perhaps the blood bank. A subset of substances are sometimes needed on very short notice, far from the refrigerator. For example, oxytocin (used to contract the uterus after delivery) is unpredictably needed on short notice. Or, they may be required in very remote areas, where they must be carried by hand. Having no access to refrigeration, but knowing the need for the substances, many facilities simply leave a vial of the substance on the counter or exposed to heat and hope that it does not loose its potency.
Specifications
What is needed is a refrigerator of very small volume. It should be sufficient to store one days worth of the chemical (perhaps 5 ml) without the need for electricity or, preferably, any outside fuel. The cavity should be able to be maintained at about 10 degrees C for 12 hours. It could require shaking, cranking, solar, a hot piece of charcoal or any other non-electric fuel source. Costs should be below $100 in quantities of 500.
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Past work
The Zeer Pot (pictured) makes use of evaporative cooling. It's difficult to find a figure for the the extent of cooling possible; it likely varies with pot and filler types.
Contact
if interested, contact Matt Ball (matt.ball.2 a gmail)
Zeer Pot Experimentation
The refrigeration team constructed two zeer pots on September 14, 2008. A large and small pot was created with ceramics from Home Depot; there were concerns that the pots may not have been porous enough. 14-hour temperature testing was performed in the Teer basement labs overnight. These labs are kept fairly cool so the team decided to shine two incandescent lamps on them through the testing to encourage evaporation.
Just after shaking off the screensaver the morning after data-collection, the laptop taking the temperature data went to a blue screen. The attached LoggerPro file, zeer_test1.cmbl, shows the initial data point (which was autosaved) and the final temperature data, roughly 17 hours after the test began. The actual collected data can be visualized with an asymptotic rise in temperature over a four hour period from the initial to the final data point (the data was briefly seen before the computer crashed).
time |
T1 |
T2 |
T3 |
T4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
0 |
25.635 |
22.2654 |
23.1274 |
22.9877 |
17.8175 |
26.934 |
27.9791 |
30.053 |
27.0965 |
need info from Toni as to which Ti belongs to which probe
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