Instrumentation Development For Assessing The Environment Inside Shipping Containers Of Pancreatic Islets During Air Transportation

This study was conducted to obtain information on the effect of altitude on the internal environment of shipping containers for pancreatic islet cells being transported by commercial aircraft. Previous experience has shown that islet cell counts decrease after the islet cells have been transported by air and received at their point of destination.

A data acquisition system was designed to gather fundamental data for use in the analysis of the effects of the environment inside the containers holding the pancreatic islet cell samples being shipped by either ground or air transport, or both. A test apparatus, which fits the existing islet containers, was constructed to sense temperature, pressure, and the presence of dissolved gases in the islet container, because these factors are hypothesized to be the potential causes for islet cell losses. In the present study, pressure and temperature data was collected with a remote data logger, and analyzed to determine the variations in pressure and temperature inside the shipping containers, while the containers were transported by both ground and air vehicles. Investigation of dissolved gases, and their variation inside the islet shipping containers, is a subject of future study. The physical components of the data acquisition system and an analysis of the experimental data are described in this thesis together with some conclusions about the potential causes of islet destruction.