Blood Product MKT Calculator (Red Cells)

Red cell concentrates are stored at 2–6 °C — a tighter band than pharmaceutical 2–8 °C — under continuous monitoring per transfusion standards. The authoritative limit is whatever your product's labelled storage condition and stability data specify — read it off the marketing authorisation, the manufacturer's storage statement or the governing pharmacopoeia, and enter your real temperature history against it.

Red cell viability and bacterial-safety margins are tighter: above 6 °C, the risk of bacterial proliferation rises and red-cell quality degrades faster, so transfusion standards (AABB, ISBT, national services) mandate 2–6 °C with continuous, alarmed monitoring. The cold limit (don't freeze non-cryo components) matters too. MKT can summarise a storage interval's thermal stress, but blood banking relies primarily on bright-line rules — continuous monitoring, alarm response, and limits like the 30-minute rule for issued units — rather than averaging. Treat this calculator as a supplementary record, not the compliance basis.

Because degradation is not linear with temperature — it accelerates roughly exponentially (Arrhenius). A simple average treats an hour at 30 °C the same as an hour at 20 °C either side of 25 °C, but the product is harmed far more by the hot hour. MKT weights each reading by exp(−ΔH/RT), so it reflects the true cumulative chemical stress. It is always ≥ the arithmetic mean, and it is the figure regulators expect for storage and distribution compliance.

Use a representative series with durations — typically the logger's interval readings, or summarised blocks of 'X hours at Y °C' if you only have an excursion summary. The more granular the data, the more accurate the MKT, but the result is dominated by the warm excursions, so capturing those accurately matters most. Don't average data before entering it — that defeats the point; enter the temperatures and let the calculator do the kinetic weighting.