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…

One of Christine’s projects was to determine if pinholes affected electrical resistance (TEER) measurements.  She summarized her work here.  I collected her data and did some negative controls to finish this work up.  Here’s the graph: The “no membranes” data…

Separations were performed at 2 different salt concentrations with equal volume filtrate and retentate (to avoid dilution problem). Separation time was 40hrs rather than the usual 24. The lower salt concentration run has a lower cutoff – which is just…

Christine and I have been looking into whether the O-ring position affects transport through pnc-Si transwells.  The hypothesis was that the unstirred water layer under the Sepcon might be diminished by switching the O-ring from its normal position (“O-ring bottom”)…

UPDATED: More sizing characterization (see chart and figure below). We recently purchased our own gold ladder, and today I’ve done some of the initial characterization.  Particles come in 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, and 40nm.  Here are the absorbance scans…

Anant and I have been doing long-term discoloration experiments for the past few weeks.  We set up samples in “ideal” conditions – pnc-Si in transwells with pnc-Si side down, autoclaved samples and in the incubator (lower OH-).  The only non-ideal…

PDMS/membrane deflection was measured on Veeco profiler by JP and me. The main problem with this kind of measurement is that it is taken form the backside of the membrane and the walls need to be excluded from the measurement.…