Team:BS United China/Implementation

• 
• Home
• Team
  • Team Members
  • Collaboration
  • Partnership
  • Attribution
  • Contribution
• Project
  • Description
  • Design
  • Result
  • Model
  • Implementation
  • Proof Of Concept
• Parts
• Lab
  • Engineering Success
  • Experiments
  • Notebook
  • Safety
• Human Practices
  • Integrated HP
  • Education

Implementation

Not only is the general topic a relatable problem encountered by all of us in daily life, but our project itself was born with the aim to be utilized in the context of real world. Therefore, we identified the two main groups of potential customers for our product and managed to reach out to one of them for a piece of their thoughts on how our product could be applied.

IDENTIFICATION OF POTENTIAL USERS

We first brainstormed and came up with three most effective applications of our product in real life:

- Elongate shelf life for fresh products in supermarkets. Our PVDQ-GFP is able to be added directly to products such as meats, fish and shellfish to prevent the synthesis of biofilms and accumulation of bio-toxin.

- Suppress any bacteria left on the shelves, to prevent them from growing further by forming biofilms.

- Extend expiration date for ordinary food products inside homes, at the same time, using our part-1 engineering bacteria test paper, users are also able to identify the level of freshness for food.

The scientific concept behind the design of our product is intricate; however, for the general public, the purpose of it can be interpreted as simply “a non-toxic substance used to identify and prevent bacteria spreading in food”. Thus, regular households are the first group of potential users we thought of. There are 280,000 food poisoning cases recorded annually, most are simply due to people not having the knowledge for the state of the food they are consuming and lacking measures to prevent contamination. With the help of our product, we are confident the numbers will go down effectively. The second main user of our product could be supermarkets, especially national, chained ones that involve in massive quantity of fresh food items being imported daily. Our product is able to reveal whether food items have qualified qualities when they are purchased, in order to further prevent customers eventually buying food damaging to their bodies.

TO GO ONE STEP FURTHER

We scheduled an interview with the manager of one of the Yonghui supermarkets in Shanghai. With one of most numbers of chain stores in China, there are immense amount of food items being placed on the shelves each day in each store; and our team firmly believes an interview with the manager will give us a more thorough understanding of how the supply chain functions and precisely at which point can our product be applied.

Fig.1

During the interview, the manager gave us plenty valuable advices about how he believes our product can be used by Yonghui. He suggested the most logical place to be when fresh food items are first imported. The current quality standard test requires 3-4 days to complete; however, if using our product, would only take minutes. He said this could potentially greatly save material and human cost involved in the supply chain.

CHALLENGES

Fig.2

While discussing the possibility of our product for regular households, the manager said the biggest challenge we will face is the lack of awareness for food safety for ordinary households. Many of them do not realize the consequences of contaminated food and importance of food safety. Therefore, we should aim to promote our product with suitable medias that make it appear essential for maintaining healthiness, in order to attract households to purchase.

We are also planning on creating test papers based on part-1 engineering bacteria. The primary challenge we are facing is the fact test results take four hours in the lab until the red color becomes visible. Therefore, we are going to utilize the efficiency of LuxR to accelerate the yield speed of red protein to be able to test for AHL accumulation in food within a short amount of time

Other challenges include lowering the production cost of PVDQ and achieving full automation of the protein purification process. We are currently working on employing similar microfluidic techniques we used last year to achieve this.