Single Use Syringe

• Jakub Marek
• Moin Owaisi
• Riken Patel
• Andrew Rivera

Advisors: Anthony E. Felder, PhD, Miiri Kotche, PhD

Sponsors: Terry Layton, PhD

In the current marketplace, the most commonly used syringe is a disposable model. The problem with the disposable syringe is that it can be misused to provide multiple injections due to negligence or to save cost. When a syringe is reused, the transmission risk of diseases increases. Some of these diseases include Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS. Currently, there are no types of single-use syringes being sold in the mass market. However, some novel designs we found include the breakaway plunger, retractable needle syringe, single-use fillable syringe, and k1 syringe. These designs never made it to the mass market as they are too complex to make/use, and costly unit price. Our goal is to prevent the transmission of diseases/contamination by designing a syringe that purposely fails after a single injection. We accomplished this by implementing a mechanical design to remove the functionality of the plunger. Our design implements a ring embedded inside the barrel so that when the plunger is injected past this ring, any attempt to re-aspirate causes the rubber on the plunger to be removed which disables the syringe. Our Hi-Fi prototype consists of a ring made with 1mm wire threaded through the barrel providing enough resistance to meet our design requirement. The most important aspect of a syringe to test is the forces applied for use. The glide force is the force required to push past the ring. The breakaway force is the pulling force required to break the rubber tip off the plunger. This is done to make our device user friendly and comparable to the widely used disposable syringe. Our final product will be created with injection molding including a negative CAD design of the barrel. The single-use syringe will help prevent millions of cross contamination cases between patients.

See supporting documentation in the team’s Box drive.