Sealing the vials

This part of the project was to find an optimal way to seal the vials. The seal must be rigid enough to be pierced by the connector and prevent the vial sample from realising. So first, we reject all the plastic material to concentrate on aluminum seal.

 

We found four solutions :

Solutions

Advantages

Disadvantages

Gluing a round cut aluminum foil on the top of the vial with liquid Uhu glue

  • Easy to produce
  • Not expansive
  • Close to what we want to finally have
  • The glue take hours to be completely dried
  • Glue can modify the optimal environment of the GMO in the vial, so we have to put glue just where aluminum is in contact with glass
  • Take long time to seal many vial

 

Use some aluminum scotch

  • Easy to find
  • Not expansive

 

  • The glue is not strong enough and the seal is snatched before it is pierced.

 

Restick a food packaging aluminum with an ironer

 

  • Do-it-yourself
  • No cost

 

  • The plastic which covers the aluminum is impossible to be pierced by the connector
  • The ironer temperature can modify the GMO optimal conservation temperature
  • Optimally we should remove the plastic which cover the aluminum but it is impossible

 

Induction sealing machine

 

  • Similar to the industrial way of proceed

 

  • Quite expansive

 

 

So we have also thought about a plastic material sealing solution :

Solution

Advantages

Disadvantages

Parafilm

  • Easy to find (use in laboratories to seal vials)

 

  • Not strong enough to prevent from bacteria release during transport
  • Impossible to pierce it with the connector, the parafilm is removed when we screw

 

For the plastic solution, we have two options to be sure that the double cap connector pierces the seal :

 

Finally, the best solution seems to be gluing some aluminum at the head of the vial. To prevent the risk of toxicity of the glue for the bacteria, we have to put some glue just in the part in contact with the glass of the vial.

It stays possible to seal by head a few vials, but it is difficult if we have to perform this sealing hundreds of times.

In this case, the best solution would be the industrial way of sealing by induction.

 

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