Petri Dish Device
MEDICAL DEVICE TOOLING DESIGN CHALLENGE
As part of a UC Davis Design Competition, served as the CAD lead on a team of 5 students to create a solution to a lab problem.
About
Our team of five engineering students from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at San Jose State University traveled and participated in a 48-hour Make-a-Thon at the University of California, Davis. We won a top-three award, “Highest Potential Team.” Fifteen teams attended, the top five were invited to become prototyping teams, while the other 10 continued as CAD teams.
Our task was to design a device to remove seven cylindrical plugs of agar gel from a petri dish in a given pattern. The dishes are used for testing blood samples for Valley Fever, which has symptoms similar to the flu. UC Davis asked the participants to improve the current process of preparing dishes.
Our first design consisted of a large outer syringe with seven internal syringes to remove the gel plugs simultaneously with suction when the user pulls the handle. When our design was not selected for prototyping, we took a risk and created an entirely new design with limited time. The new design used an inverted petri dish so that gravity could assist rather than hinder the plug removal. Each dish is placed on top of the collection chamber and stamped downward to create the wells, and the plugs collect in the straws and containment unit below.
Thank you to my teammates Denice Serna, Shreejit Padmanabhan, Sneha Srinivasan, and Hanh Vu
Thank you to BMES at SJSU and UC Davis, and to all those who supported us. It was a great opportunity for us to develop as young engineers.
CAD Video
