I-Corps Team: Battery-Free, Millimeter-Scale Silicon Devices for Tempertature Monitoring

I-Corps项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力是确保温度调节供应链的完整性。在制药和食品工业中，温度中断可导致效力或安全性丧失，从而对公众健康产生不利影响并增加成本。例如，目前每种COVID-19疫苗在运输过程中都需要其特定的环境条件，范围从-70℃到5℃。偏离该温度范围可能导致疫苗损坏，无法发挥预期作用。在疫苗分发范围内，由于缺乏每瓶温度监测信息，大量疫苗瓶可能被丢弃。尽管2019冠状病毒病凸显了这一问题，但全球仍需要小型、廉价的温度传感器，以验证药品温度的完整性。腐败问题不仅限于仅占冷链市场25%左右的制药行业，而且在食品分配系统中也很普遍，为该项目开发的温度传感器的应用创造了更多的机会。I-Corps项目进一步开发了一种小型时间温度传感器，作为解决低温供应链温度中断的一种手段。传感器技术的核心是新型无电池量子动力系统，该系统可以根据所暴露的温度条件改变其状态。这些系统使用标准硅制造技术制造，具有成本效益和可扩展性。与现有的体积庞大且价格昂贵的温度监测方法相比，这些硅基设备能够在经济上可行地实现每瓶水平的可靠且可量化的温度监测。使用电子监测解决方案的其他好处是，它们可以用于一系列温度监测剖面，检测冻结损伤和振动，零停机时间，并执行连续测井，这可能有助于确定供应链中的故障，以便将来缓解故障。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to assure the integrity of temperature regulated supply chains. In the pharmaceutical and food industries, temperature disruptions can cause loss of potency or safety, leading to adverse effects on public health and increased costs. For example, each of the current COVID-19 vaccines requires its own specific environmental conditions during transport, ranging from -70 C to 5 C. Excursions from this temperature range can lead to damaged vaccines that do not work as intended. Within the scope of vaccine distribution, significant numbers of vaccine vials may be discarded due to a lack of per-vial temperature monitoring information. Although COVID-19 has highlighted this problem, there is a global demand for small, inexpensive temperature sensors that could verify the integrity of pharmaceutical temperatures. The problem of spoilage is not unique to the pharmaceutical industry, which constitutes only around 25% of the cold supply chain market, but is also widespread in the food distribution systems, creating additional opportunities for the application of temperatures sensors developed in the project. This I-Corps project further develops a small, time-temperature sensor as a means of addressing temperature disruptions in the cold temperature supply chain. At the core of the sensor technology is novel battery-free quantum dynamical systems which change their state based on the temperature conditions to which they are exposed. These systems are manufactured using standard silicon fabrication techniques and are cost-effective and scalable. As compared to existing temperature monitoring methods which are often bulky and expensive, these silicon-based devices enable an economically-viable approach for robust and quantifiable temperature monitoring at the per-vial level. Additional benefits of using an electronic monitoring solution are that they can be used across a range of temperature monitoring profiles, detect freeze damage and vibrations, have zero-downtime, and perform continuous logging which may facilitate pinpointing faults in the supply chain for future mitigation.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.