Anurudh Ganesan has always been inspired in the areas of engineering, science and world geography. As an infant his grandparents had to carry him for ten miles to be vaccinated, but upon reaching the clinic learned the vaccines were no longer viable after being stored in a high temperature area. This story stuck in his head as he developed VAXXWAGON , an active refrigeration system for last-leg vaccine transportation. The project won the Lego Education Builder Award at the 2015 Google Science Fair.
Ganesan uses a statistic from the World Health Organization in his project summary – in 2013 around 1.5 million children died as a result of inappropriate or ineffective vaccines. After vaccines are transported to population centers the last leg of delivery to remote villages and settlements require specialized equipment that may not be available. Electricity and ice packs are sometimes used in the transport of the vaccines but have difficulty maintaining temperature. His goal was to develop an active refrigeration system that could be powered by human, bicycle or animal.
A model airplane engine was used as the compressor for the cooling system in the first prototype. Torque problems and leakage caused this iteration to be rejected. The second prototype uses a double-acting pneumatic cylinder instead of an engine, and a loop of copper tubing for the condenser. A large thermos houses the cold chamber. A bicycle trailer with a ground driven transmission was added to provide power to the unit. Testing for the system was done on a treadmill at first and later with Anurudh’s bicycle. The goal is to keep the vaccines at a temperature of 2-8 degrees Celsius during the vaccine transport process.
VAXXWAGON is a great invention with a very well documented development process. It’s great to see a talented student using thermodynamic diagrams to create a project. The device definitely needs commercial development before mass production can happen but the ideas and prototype work look great. Ganesan has already won the Johns Hopkins University CTY Cogito Research Award for this project and appeared on The Today Show as part of Shell’s Make the Future contest .