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

Award ID: 2135463

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.

NSF Program Director: Ruth Shuman