The current method of testing water permeability through SepCons is to place a volume of water inside a SepCon and spin it inside a centrifuge.  After a set period of time, the volume passed is collected.  The “approximate” permeability can…

We have a high school student, Nikita, (from my Summer Nanotech class) who is volunteering in the lab.  Jim and I have assigned him the project of exploring diffusion of very small molecules through porous and putatively nonporous membranes.  Currently,…

In the last production cycle, there were several wafers annealed for longer than our standard 1 minute RTP soak time.  Recall in my earlier post, I observed a significant change in pore morphology in a 30 nm thick silicon membrane…

In this experiment, I wanted to test how quickly vacuoles form in endothelial cells when cultured on pnc-Si transwells.  Here I used 30nm SC502 RTP’ed samples with the pnc-Si side down.  I seeded P9 bEnd3 cells at 50000 cells/cm2 on…

This is a draft of a figure I think I’d like to use in my upcoming paper about charge based separations (this paper will include the Bernhard data).  I thought I’d post it here first to get some feedback.  I’ll…

A while back, we discussed leaving the rotation stage off during the a-Si deposition to induce a thickness gradient over a single wafer.  The purpose of this experiment was to explore the different morphologies vs. thickness at a given RTP…

In my last diffusion experiment, I used wafer SC 442. The results seemed to show that IgG was indeed diffusing through the membrane. As a follow up experiment, I am trying to show that I can pass IgG through more…

As I was preparing for the BMES conference, I took a few pictures of endothelial cells on pnc-Si transwells that showed extensive vacuole/endosome expression (here).  The most dramatic example occurred on a 50nm-thick membrane that was barely porous.  So I…

The results of my last diffusion experiment regarding BSA and filtered IgG (using SC 364) were inconclusive. (See “Diffusion Test– filtered IgG and BSA”) Looking at the histogram of results, there is no clear difference between the absorption of filtered…

In my 1st post detailing glial cells on pnc-Si transwells, I saw lots of cell clumps above the membrane window (see here).  Since these cells were grown in the wells, I thought they could be piling on top of each…