Modeling Drug Degradation Kinetics in Smart Polymer Packaging Under Variable Transport Conditions with Real-Time Signal Feedback

Bukola Adebayo¹, Oluwaseun Olatunde², Paula Wordie³, Folake Oladoyin⁴, Oluwaseun Abegunde⁵, and Muyiwa Jegede⁶

¹Department of Business Analytics & Technology Management, Towson University, Maryland, USA

²School of Environmental Sciences, University of Hull, Hull, United Kingdom

³Department of Biology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Brussels, Belgium

⁴Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Federal University of Technology Akure, Akure, Nigeria

⁵Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Fairfax, Virginia, USA

⁶Department of Biochemistry, Federal University of Technology, Akure, Ondo State, Nigeria

ORCID iDs: Bukola Adebayo, 0009-0004-5002-2889; Folake Oladoyin, 0009-0008-8424-311X; Oluwaseun Olatunde, 0009-0007-2287-4250; Muyiwa Jegede, 0009-0001-5275-5312.

Abstract:
We conducted a simulation-based physics-informed packaging study in which polymer barrier design, moisture ingress, humidity-responsive signal generation, and degradation kinetics were solved jointly for a thirty-day transport–storage horizon. The simulated cohort contained 900 package histories spanning baseline polymer blisters, barrier-coated packs, and desiccant-assisted packs. Internal moisture transport was driven by time-varying temperature and humidity, while retained potency followed a moisture-coupled Arrhenius law. An embedded sensing trace converted the hidden internal moisture state into a continuously readable signal, and a random-forest estimator used the first seven days of data to infer remaining shelf life. The average shelf life increased from 7.61 d in the baseline package to 8.59 d in the barrier-coated design and 9.73 d in the desiccant-assisted design. The signal-moisture correlation was 0.833; shelf-life prediction achieved RMSE = 0.913 d, MAE = 0.731 d, and R² = 0.857. The study is intentionally narrow: it asks how early signal feedback can quantify moisture-driven stability risk for smart polymer packaging and how material choices shift that risk. Because the work was executed as a completed computational experiment, the paper reports finished trajectories, design comparisons, and prediction results rather than hypothetical outcomes.

Keywords: polymer packaging, moisture ingress, drug stability, smart packaging, shelf-life prediction, humidity sensing, barrier materials