Designing A Smart Temperature Controlled System for Vaccine Transport Container with Thermoelectric Peltier using Fuzzy Logic and Internet of Things
Background Idea
in this covid-19 pandemic era, I’m in the final semester of pursuing my physics bachelor degree. I started to search for my thesis idea at the beginning of the covid-19 outbreaks. My search began with watching so many youtube videos and read some journals. In the end, I got some enlightenment from watching the news on tv. I know right, It was weird that I have been looking and searching in the wrong places. It also showed me that vaccination has always been a problem for developing countries. I started to wonder what is the main problem. As far as I know, vaccines are the first defence against dangerous viruses such as Ebola, Influenza, or in this case Corona Virus. After I did some research, I finally conclude that the developing countries have some difficulty when transporting vaccines. The Vaccine supplies are hard to transport into regions with limited resources and many rural medical clinics lack the funding to provide refrigeration systems. Because of that problem, I have an idea to design a Smart Temperature Controlled System for Vaccine Transport Container with Thermoelectric Peltier using Fuzzy Logic and the Internet of Things.
Building The Container Design
I started building for the container design after I did some research about vaccine transport containers. I used Fusion 360 3D modelling software to create my first design version. When I designed it at the time, I also looked for box containers and their size in the online shop marketplace. I decided to choose a 10L container box for my vaccine transport container. The pictures below are my 3D design.
as you can see from the pictures above, The temperature control system consists of an Arduino Mega, a DHT22 temperature sensor, a thermoelectric cooling Peltier, a raspberry pi zero w, an LCD touchscreen and a fan. The temperature control system is divided into two rooms, a temperature insulation room for biological samples and a hardware room for system control.
Building The Hardware
This the lists of what I need to build this temperature controlled system
- LCD Touch Display
2. PWM Fan
3. DHT22 Temperature Sensor
4. Thermoelectric Cooling (Peltier)
5. Arduino Mega 2560
6. Some Electronic Components
7. DC to DC converter
8. Raspberry Pi Zero W
9. Battery 12V-6Ah
10. Heat Sink
11. Insulated Container
All the components above are essential and the connection of hardware parts can be shown in the diagram below.
The diagram above shows a simple way how the hardware components connected each other. To control the temperature-controlled element I use Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) technique which requires an interface circuit with N-Channel Mosfet Transistor.
In the interface circuit, the output of the PWM value from Pin Arduino Mega PWM is connected to the Gate Transistor N-Channel Mosfet. By setting the gate value to 1 (ON) or 0 (OFF) in a certain period, it can produce the desired duty cycle value. Fan and The Peltier are connected to the Drain Transistor N-Channel Mosfet. The voltage size through the source and drain is determined by the size of the value of PWM input at the Gate.
Building The Software
The first step when designing software for this vaccine container is Research. At first, I began to look into the internet especially GitHub to find more about IoT projects and Fuzzy logic. After I gather enough data and knowledge, I design the fuzzy logic algorithm for this project. In the link below, there are source codes for this project and for more information you can check my full thesis document (Indonesian Version). Inside the code, I also give the example how to do a serial connection between Arduino and Raspberry Pi.
Internet of Things
The last part when building the software is figuring out how to send the necessary data to Cloud Database and control the temperature-controlled system via the Internet of Things. I decided to use the Web-Based Internet of Things because I have some experience in Web Programming. Before I made the website I need to figure out how to send and receive data from Raspberry Pi to Cloud Database. I began to research and find out how to do it by watching some youtube videos. I found out that to send and receive data from Raspberry Pi to Cloud Database I need to use Python and a few mysql queries. At the time, I only know a little about the Python language. So, I also decided to learn this Python language. Yeay, Finally, I learned about something new and I’m happy about it. You can check the source code in the link above. After a successful connection to the cloud database, I started to build the website. I build the website using the bootstrap framework, javascript, ajax, and mysql. On this website, you can control the desired temperature and view the data in real-time. I also make a real-time graph to show the changes in temperature in real-time.
http://biobox.my.id — check out the website
if you need the source code for this monitoring IoT website you can check the link below.
The Result
Finally, the next step is to integrate the hardware and the software part and voila my temperature-controlled vaccine container has done. You can look at the picture below to check the container.
As you can see, The container has an LCD touchscreen for control and user interface.
The last step in this thesis project is testing the system to gather information about its capability.
Conclusion
The Smart temperature-controlled system for vaccine transport container with thermoelectric Peltier and Internet of Things is designed using a cooler box as a good temperature insulation material with a cooling chamber size of 5 litres. The temperature control system consists of an Arduino Mega, a DHT22 temperature sensor, a thermoelectric cooling pelter, a raspberry pi zero w, an LCD touchscreen and a fan. The temperature control system is divided into two rooms, a temperature insulation room for biological samples and a hardware room for system control. The temperature difference value between the setpoint temperature and the temperature in the temperature insulation section and the temperature difference value between the hot and cold side of the Peltier is measured by the DHT22 sensor which will then be inputted to the Arduino mega. Furthermore, Arduino will perform a fuzzy logic process with three stages, fuzzification, rule evaluation, and defuzzification to produce a duty cycle value that is converted into a PWM output value and used to adjust the fan speed and Peltier voltage so that the temperature in the temperature insulation room can be controlled properly. The data processed by Arduino regarding the temperature value, temperature difference, PWM output value, and duty cycle will be sent to the raspberry pi to be uploaded to the cloud database which will be displayed via the IoT website. The temperature control system can reach the lowest temperature of 7,4°C and has the capability to cooling down temperature from 33,1°C to 7,4°C.
