I’ve always wondered what the variability was in the pore statistics extracted from TEM images of different fields on the same membrane (SC 141).  I took a series of ten images from random positions (corners, edges, center) and ran them…

After some experimentation with acetylene concentration and anneal temperature, I was able to find a carbonization recipe that appears to shrink our pores by 1/3 the original diameter.  Below are images of an untreated sample (TEM 148: 15 nm pnc-Si…

Before Anant left for India, we were doing cell adhesion studies with pnc-Si transwells and getting some weird morphologies.  Check it out here, here, here, here, here. This is in contrast with the 2D studies that Anant did for the…

First, last week I had some images taken with new “visiting” AFM. These were frontside of the membrane with parylene deposited from the well side and the front side with deposited parylene on it. 1-1. Parylene deposition was not successful…

Earlier this week, Maryna and I did some AFM of her samples.  She vapor-deposited parylene on the well-side of pnc-Si and was interested in whether/how well that polymer got through the pores.  We got some really interesting-looking scans, but I’ll…

I used the transwell track etched membranes for these permeability experiments.  I first looked at 5nm gold in 10mM KCl.  After 24 hours the retentate and filtrate had just about equilibrated: We can compare these scans to the stock 5nm…

Last week, we ran a series of wafers with three different Si thicknesses (15 nm, 30 nm, 50 nm).  We wanted to explore how morphology shifted with film thickness.  Below are three membranes that were annealed at 800 C with…

So I think I have confirmed that PDMS is at least one of if not the major contributor to the contact angle problems in the UV-ozone system. Control image before any treatment: I then dried the chip and placed it…

Nakul and I noted last week that the UV-ozone system was not performing. We took pictures of control and treated samples (2x) to measure contact angles on Amorphous, pnc-Si, Oxide and Nitride TEM grids. Our results were pathetic – most…

I wanted to have 3 repeats of the previous salt-tuned separations.  I’ve gone through and performed the densitometry on a couple more gels and compiled the results. 100mM: The first two experiments were from the two experiments set up on…