Team:Groningen/Applied Design

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Applied Design

IMPACT Cartridge

Overview

We wanted our product to be used on the factory work floor, to that end we designed a cartridge that could be used easily and safely. Legislatively this is still a problem as any GMO that is used needs a special GMO permit throughout European countries. In most cases food industry companies we went to are very opposed to acquiring such permits for factories as the public image of GMO's is often considered dangerous, especially in the food industry.

The cartridge we designed is made to be very cheap to produce (just injection molded plastics and bacteria), and very easy to use. It does not require any extra expensive lab equipment nor would the person using it need much training. This has clear advantages compared to more involved methods such as PCR analysis which need a well-stocked lab with highly trained personnel.

Operation

The instructions are essentially printed on the cartridge itself, you simply turn the 3-way valve 45° for every step. The syringe is preloaded with a hydrogen peroxide solution (30%), and does not have to be loaded by the consumer.

• Step 1: Put a syringe with the sample you wish to measure in the top (between 10-40ml).
• Step 2: Turn the valve to Sample and empty the syringe.
• Step 3: Turn the valve to Close and pull out the empty syringe.
• Step 4: Now the bacteria will be re-hydrated and start to grow. In this step you put the cartridge as a whole into an incubator and monitor it. After a set amount of time you can look through the window to see if phages have been detected.
• Step 5: After you are done measuring you can dispose of the bacteria by putting the valve to Kill and squeezing the syringe.
• Step 6: The syringe should now be empty and the valve can be set to safe.

Cartridge Design

We started out with a 2D blueprint for a box with slides that could be opened from the outside by the operator. In this idea the bacteria would be a freeze dried powder in the reaction chamber. To get the bacteria to grow a growth medium would first be added before the milk sample, and the whole box would go inside a incubator. Afterwards the whole thing would be autoclaved or incinerated. It was decided that the slides idea would be too hard to make waterproof, plus any leakage would be to the outside.

We redesigned it to have as few components penetrating the cartridge as possible, to make it as safe as it can be. Furthermore we made it a lot safer already by putting the bacteria inside a semipermeable plastic, so even if anything leaked the bacteria would not be able to get out. This new plan was worked out in 3D and a prototype was printed using our extruder 3D printer. The problem with this design was immediately obvious as the fidelity of the racks and pinions (gears) was too low to work right. Plus we had doubts concerning the slides goi