To follow up on some of Dave’s work – I was curious if the ALD alumina affects the strength of pnc-Si membranes. Punchline: 2.5 nm of Alumina seems to increase the burst pressure, while 5.0 nm reduces the burst pressure.…

This week, I did a systematic study on the growth rate of carbon on bare and aluminum oxide coated pnc-Si membranes. The bare samples were not treated prior to carbonization, while the alumina coated samples underwent a 5 nm treatment…

I am trying to deposit metal on the membrane with minimal deposition inside the pores. The image below is an example of how the film quality and thickness change when the sample is positioned at different angles and distances from…

For the charge model, we would like to know the surface charge density and size of our experimental molecules.  I’ve attempted to use the Zetasizer for both measurements, but as mentioned in my diffusion paper, DLS gives sizes that deviate…

I recently performed an experimental separation with 4 proteins in 100 and 10 mM KCl.  All proteins are negatively charged at the pH of the experiments, and we would expect that less would pass through the membrane in the 10…

With some of the recent high porosity membranes being produced, I wanted to demonstrate that we can use ALD to create a movable cut-off without sacrificing too much in permeability. I took sc713 and coated it with 5 nm and…

I’ve been working with the AFM recently and have had some success getting images on supported pnc-Si films. Yesterday, I imaged three samples from sc 698: one untreated pnc-Si film and two films coated with aluminum oxide (1.5 nm and…

Today, I ran a quick experiment to confirm that water transport was not negatively affected by an aluminum oxide coating. I deposited 1.5 nm of Al2O3 onto a pnc-Si membrane which I then treated with an oxygen plasma in the…

Today while I was imaging a Al2O3 coated pnc-Si membrane on the high-res TEM, I noticed something curious as I placed the beam on a single pore for a few minutes. I was initially interested in the structure of the…

1) FIB. I tried to get a cross section of the pnc-Si with FIB with Brian’s help. The results are negative. It looks like the ion beam almost “melts” the membrane and destroys the pores instead of cutting.  The tool…