The Sure Chill - For 'Simply Impossible Cooling'

The Sure Chill is a technology company that licences out its intellectual property i.e. refrigerators. Its new line of fridges are taking the medical sector by storm in third world countries such as Senegal, for their cheap energy storage and accurate temperature control.

Sure Chill’s cooling technology is a favourable choice as it does not require a constant power supply. It is able to provide cooling for more than10 days at a time without power in hot climates. What's more, the technology can also adapt to suit any cooling device, from cool box and domestic refrigerators to air conditioning and retail chillers.

The patented technology's initial purpose was to protect life-saving temperature-sensitive vaccines in emerging countries and vaccine refrigerators with Sure Chill technology. Since its release, it has gone on to help save millions of lives in over 47 countries around the world.

In terms of design, the unit needed to be sophisticated enough technically to achieve the thermal performance requirements whilst being extremely simple to use (the operators would be largely unskilled and possibly illiterate), cheap and very robust since it would be permanently placed at the ‘last mile’ of the vaccine cold chain in an isolated village in a very poor country.

Using a largely plastic construction this brief has been met and the first prototype units have been successfully deployed in phase 1 trials and are now moving to Phase 2 using live vaccines in a number of health posts in Senegal.

These products lead the way in the all-important freeze-free category. A commission was received from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for designing and producing a product with a near impossible design brief – to keep vaccines at their safe range of +2C to +8C for a month with no power, only ice to provide cooling - this at an ambient temperature of +43C! Months of painstaking research and development at their labs in Wales, the R&D team developed a number of design concepts to address the myriad challenges of such a brief.