Sure Chill
MLC Vanguard | Created by The Sure Chill Company
Dependable and accurate medical refrigerators for temperature-sensitive medicines and vaccines. A game-changing cooling technology enabling previously imagined access to the benefits of refrigeration.
1,718,424 Lives Impacted
Cooling is a foundation of modern society. Whether it’s people, food, medicine or data, cooling is essential in today’s world. But there is a problem. Cooling solutions rely on a constant power source. Without power they simply fail. Power outages are a daily occurrence in developing economies and increasingly threatened in developed economies. Even with energy being produced more and more from renewable, intermittent sources there is a global cooling challenge. Vaccines need to be stored at temperature between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius, ideally 4 degrees. It is estimated that 151,000,000 vaccines are ruined every year due to ineffective refrigeration. This is either due to power outages which means they get too warm, or because they have been frozen, because many medical refrigeration devices rely on ice to maintain the cool temperature. Launched in the medical sector in 2011, the company started with a focus on vaccine refrigeration.
Sure Chill’s technology is already used today in medical devices approved by the World Health Organization, purchased by UNICEF and supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, GAVI and the Clinton Health Access Initiative. Used in devices in more than 49 countries, the technology is ensuring vaccines remain perfectly cool in some of the world’s harshest environments which have extremely poor power supplies and high ambient temperatures. Four degrees Celsius is also the perfect temperature to store food, and in Africa for example, only 2% of people who live in an off-grid location have access to refrigeration, Sure Chill technology would allow much greater access to domestic refrigeration than is currently possible. Sure Chill is trialling its technology in domestic fridges, providing refrigeration for homes and villages in off-grid areas, working closely with the Shell Foundation whilst also exploring the domestic technology in Weak-Grid areas.
The Innovation
Conventional refrigerators rely on access to constant power - to control temperature they allow temperature inside to rise and fall to trigger the cooling circuit to come on and turn off. This means that not only do they fail quickly in the absence of power but their temperature is constantly varying. It's common to use ice to provide a buffer but this is too cold for most things you find in a fridge, that don't tolerate being Zero Centigrade or below. Food, vaccines and pharmaceuticals all want to be between 2 and 8 C. Other materials can be used instead of ice. Typically these have 'freezing' points higher than Zero and are referred to a Phase Change Materials (PCMs) but these are very expensive and take up a lot of space inside a refrigerator (they are also often highly flammable). Ice is better than PCMs because it is very cheap, very clean and has a much higher energy density. Sure Chill is able to use these positive attributes by exploiting water's other unique property - that it is heaviest at 4C. This produces a self-regulating system that uses natural convection to deliver a steady 4C to the produce in the fridge - never any colder or hotter. The amount of ice in the system can be tuned to the application. In models currently made the fridge can continue to operate without power for anything from a few days to a few weeks.
Sure Chill uses two outstanding properties of water. Firstly, when frozen it has the ability to store large amounts of energy in quite a small space and, unlike any kind of battery, it can the 'charged' and discharged an infinite number of times without wearing out. But ice has a problem because it risks freezing the items being stored - this is a particular problem with vaccines but many foods are badly damaged by freezing. Water's second and most important property is that it has unusual density characteristics - Its heaviest at 4C. This means if you heat water up it gets lighter (see it rising in a hot saucepan) but ice also floats. For instance if you pour a glass of water and add ice. It is also very low cost to deploy since it's principle working element is plain water.
Implemented in
Australia, Papua New Ghuinea, and other 60 countries
Get in touch
SureChill HQ
About SureChill
Nobody else does cooling the way our patented technology does. Our refrigerators don’t need batteries, which are harmful to the environment and don’t respond well in high ambient temperatures. The holdover of our devices – the amount of time they can stay at the correct temperature without power – is up to 12 days, much longer than others. We don’t cool using ice lined devices.
