Difference between revisions of "Team:TCFSH Taiwan/Description"
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<p class="title">Motivation</p> | <p class="title">Motivation</p> | ||
| − | <p class="content">A bottle of cold drink is a fantastic idea on a scorching summer day, but what if the drink is contaminated with plasticizers? Many people know that plastic bottles will release harmful plasticizers into the drink at high temperatures, so they sensibly avoid leaving bottled drinks or water in hot places, like their cars. However, what if the drink has been contaminated during transportation from the factory to the retail store? Besides bottled beverages, many other products, such as cosmetics or medicine, may pose potential threats to human health if they are stored at inadequate temperatures or exposed to sunlight for too long during the delivery process. The danger is real and immediate, but it is humanly impossible to monitor every delivery procedure. Therefore, we plan to invent a biosensor which can help monitor and ensure the cargo quality in transit. | + | <p class="content">A bottle of cold drink is a fantastic idea on a scorching summer day, but what if the drink is contaminated with plasticizers? Many people know that plastic bottles will release harmful plasticizers into the drink at high temperatures, so they sensibly avoid leaving bottled drinks or water in hot places, like their cars. However, what if the drink has been contaminated during transportation from the factory to the retail store? Besides bottled beverages, many other products, such as cosmetics or medicine, may pose potential threats to human health if they are stored at inadequate temperatures or exposed to sunlight for too long during the delivery process. The danger is real and immediate, but it is humanly impossible to monitor every delivery procedure. Therefore, we plan to invent a biosensor which can help monitor and ensure the cargo quality in transit.Though we were inspired by the release of plasticizer from the bottle into the drinking water, we soon found that there is not much difference between the amount of plasticizer released at 25 degrees Celsius and that released at 35 degrees Celsius. Thus, we decided to apply our product mainly to foods, cosmetics and medicines. The target temperature we’ve set is 37 degrees Celsius, the temperature at which bacteria reproduce most rapidly. However, chance always outpaces plans. After reviewing the answers to the questionnaires that we designed, doing more research on the Internet, and asking many experts in the food transportation field, we soon realized that our products are not useful in food transportation. Thus, we shifted our focus to nutrition supplements, cosmetics, and medicines eventually. |
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| + | <p class="content">How will temperature affect the quality of these products? We can look deeply into three aspects. First, most germs like to grow in warmer temperatures like 37 degrees Celsius, so if the product is exposed to high temperatures for too long, it will increase the chances of the product going bad. Second, oil and water don’t mix without the help of the emulsifier. However, the emulsifier would start to lose its effect as the temperature rises. When it reaches 40 degrees Celsius, the emulsifier will totally lose its effect, which turns cosmetic products useless and disgusting. Third, dietary supplements, like vitamin B, lose their nutrients under high temperatures. To guarantee the quality, it’s crucial to keep the temperature low.</p> | ||
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<p class="title">Background</p> | <p class="title">Background</p> | ||
<p class="content">The popularity of internet has been increasing considerably in the 21st century, and purchasing in non-physical store has thus become the mainstream of consumption pattern. By investigating through our online questionnaire, we’ve found that at least 95.5% of customers do care what happened with the items they bought during the transportation process. The change of purchasing habit make transporting very crucial. Buyer and seller usually do not know what kind of environment had the cargoes gone through. As a result, a portion of defectives were damaged or deteriorated through the transporting process, but others already had flaws as soon as they were produced. And this lead to a controversial situation: how can we determine who’s responsible for this? We thus aim on three aspects, which are the factory, the transporting company, and the consumers, to carry out our questionnaire survey. The results show that there are three primary reasons that give rise to product damaged or deteriorated, which are external impacts, high temperature, and sunlight (UV light). Since whether the product is damaged by external force is obviously to be seen just by looking at its outlook, we chose to design a sticker to sense temperature and UV light. The sticker sticks on the boxes or products that need to be transport, and when the sticker changes its color, it means that the process of transportation is not adequate and so needs to be changed. </p> | <p class="content">The popularity of internet has been increasing considerably in the 21st century, and purchasing in non-physical store has thus become the mainstream of consumption pattern. By investigating through our online questionnaire, we’ve found that at least 95.5% of customers do care what happened with the items they bought during the transportation process. The change of purchasing habit make transporting very crucial. Buyer and seller usually do not know what kind of environment had the cargoes gone through. As a result, a portion of defectives were damaged or deteriorated through the transporting process, but others already had flaws as soon as they were produced. And this lead to a controversial situation: how can we determine who’s responsible for this? We thus aim on three aspects, which are the factory, the transporting company, and the consumers, to carry out our questionnaire survey. The results show that there are three primary reasons that give rise to product damaged or deteriorated, which are external impacts, high temperature, and sunlight (UV light). Since whether the product is damaged by external force is obviously to be seen just by looking at its outlook, we chose to design a sticker to sense temperature and UV light. The sticker sticks on the boxes or products that need to be transport, and when the sticker changes its color, it means that the process of transportation is not adequate and so needs to be changed. </p> | ||
Revision as of 03:59, 31 October 2017
