SBIR Phase I: Development of an industrial flow meter for low-volume dispensing

这个小型企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目将创造一种新的方式来提供某些液体，如静脉注射药物。 小剂量配药（每年全球市场价值356.3亿美元）是许多不同行业的重要活动，包括制药，医疗器械和消费品（例如香精香料）。这些行业的公司正在生产高价值的浓缩液体，需要以高效、准确和精确的方式提供极少量的液体，以最大限度地减少材料损失，确保客户的安全和产品的完整性。当前的点胶技术通过抑制并行点胶而在制造过程中产生瓶颈，或者成本太高而无法证明其提供的价值。该项目提出了一种可灭菌、高度准确且资源高效的解决方案，可输送少量多种类型的流体，吞吐量增加20倍，占地面积减少75%，成本降低95%，而不影响准确性或精度。这些特性直接满足了多个行业领域的需求，如药物分配，科学研究和制造。该项目的智力价值是提出一种弹性细丝测速法（EFV），该方法利用基于应变的传感器来测量通过独立的导电纳米级条带的流体的速度。来自通过流的阻力使纳米取向器偏转，并引起轴向应变和与流直接相关的阻力的变化。传感元件的小尺寸导致粘性主导的拖曳力，从而实现对液体和气体的灵敏度。大多数商业应变传感器在整个构件被校准到流体速度之前利用在一个或多个表面上嵌入有应变计的校准杠杆或板。目前的方法将校准的构件和应变计组合成单个单元，消除了先前设计中最复杂和昂贵的方面。该项目将通过探索更容易获得的纳米材料，量化传感器随时间的漂移，表征对不同流体特性的响应，并通过将传感器暴露于非理想条件来定义操作参数，从而进一步增强这项技术。在项目结束时，传感器将有明确的校准和操作参数，并将适用于各种流体，包括注射液。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will create a new way to deliver certain fluids, such as intravenous drugs. Small dose dispensing ($35.63 billion annual global market) is a vital activity across many different industries including pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and consumer products (e.g. flavors & fragrances). Firms in these sectors are creating highly valuable concentrated liquids and need to deliver extremely small volumes in an efficient, accurate, and precise manner to minimize lost materials and ensure the safety of their customers and integrity of their product. Current dispensing technologies create a bottleneck in the manufacturing process by inhibiting parallel dispensing, or are too costly to justify the value they provide. This project advances a sterilizable, highly accurate, and resource-efficient solution to deliver small amounts of many types of fluids with up to 20-fold increase in throughput, 75% footprint reduction, and 95% reduction in cost without compromising accuracy or precision. These properties directly meet the needs in several industry segments such as pharmaceutical dispensing, scientific research, and manufacturing. The intellectual merit of this project is to advance a method of elastic filament velocimetry (EFV), which utilizes a strain-based sensor to measure the velocity of fluid passing over a free-standing, electrically-conductive nanoscale ribbon. Drag from the passing flow deflects the nanoribbon and induces an axial strain and a change in the resistance that is directly related to flow. The small dimensions of the sensing element result in viscously-dominated drag force, enabling sensitivity to both liquids and gases. Most commercial strain-based sensors utilize calibrated cantilevers or plates embedded with strain gauges on one or more surfaces before the entire member is calibrated to the fluid velocity. The current approach combines the calibrated member and strain gauge into a single unit, eliminating the most complicated and expensive aspects of previous designs. The project will further enhance this technology by exploring more accessible nanoribbon materials, quantifying sensor drift over time, characterizing response to differing fluid properties, and define operating parameters by exposing the sensor to non-ideal conditions. At the conclusion of the project, the sensors will have defined calibration and operating parameters and will be suitable for use with a wide array of fluids, including injectables.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.