The physis must be kept alive by our device in order for any of the testing we plan on doing to have any meaning. This is the key part of our aims and the implications of this affected literally every aspect of our project. The components/modules we designed and used had to be able to function in the incubator we use. This implies that they’d have to work in an environment that is constantly at 37^oC and 95% humidity.

Of the things mentioned above, accommodating the physis and keeping it alive was paramount to the success of this project. Not only was it the assumption on which all the components will be working under, it’s the most vital part of our needs and problem statement that we had to address. We couldn’t use the components we planned to create as intended unless the physis could be kept alive and growing during the time we used them. This was the largest bottleneck of the project.

A critical dependency we had was to complete our designs, agree on one, and build it on SolidWorks. Without that, none of the project could progress and modules could not be built. Most of the rest of the project was performed in parallel to the other parts of the design. The bottleneck for this dependency was actually hashing out the rough designs as doing those took a lot of time and work to complete.

Most resources weren’t a problem. The incubator and microscope were already in the lab and Dr. Sah ordered the calf ulna tissue that we needed to isolate the physis slices as we needed them. Machining the components of the bioreactor was the largest setback we faced, due to a dependency on finalizing Solidworks designs and a lack of expertise/experience in machining on our end.