Portable cell culture incubation chamber

• Main Author: Ritanjali R Elangovan
• Other Authors: Pui Tze Sian
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Chemical and Biomedical Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/75429
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Incubators are used to maintain and grow cell cultures or microbiological cultures. The incubator maintains an atmosphere of optimal humidity, temperature and other critical conditions like concentration of carbon dioxide. Incubators are essential for all the experimental work done in various fields such as cell biology, microbiology and molecular biology. However, the traditional incubators are big and not portable. They have limited use in live-cell imagining. Although portable incubators can be found in the commercial market, either they are too expensive or incompatible with all types of microscope. Hence, we wanted to come up with an incubator chamber that is portable and is compatible to all types of microscopes which supports live cell imaging. The incubator was designed using a 3 Dimensional(3D) Modelling Software called Autodesk 3D Fusion and the initial prototype was printed out using a 3D printer. My part for this project is to design the incubator housing(chamber). The final prototype of the incubator chamber is made from acrylic material and it consists heater mat, thermistor, humidity and carbon dioxide sensors and valves for media perfusion. This report will give insights on how my design process was carried out, how the final prototype was achieved and some experimental results on the efficacy of the incubation chamber.