We’ve been moving to a new format for chips, trying to standardize an active area that has good yield and allows fluidic access through the chip itself. The SEPCON outer dimensions have been reused (5.4 mm x 5.4 mm). It’s…

A bit of background: In order to quantify how permeable a tissue barrier is, we use a method known as trans epithelial electrical resistance (TEER). Cells are grown on a permeable growth substrate in a transwell format. When the cells…

I believe that we can use MgF2 nanomembranes as electroosmotic pumps, along the same lines as pnc-Si and NPN materials. To first get a sense of how much pumping I would expect, I wanted to know what the zeta potential…

In our last post we showed that this latest wafer with 36 nm pores did a better job of blocking 20 nm NPs in the forward and reverse orientations, whereas an older wafer (1070- 45 nm, 15%) showed better separations…

I attended the 2014 Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Fuel Cells in August. For those of you not familiar with Gordon conferences, I will make a plug for them as a great venue for learning much detail and interacting closely…

I recommend we review this article in NRG or journal club – it was just published online in Advanced Functional Materials this week. I see a lot things in this paper that appear to be motivated by our work. They showed SFM/AFM…

Sarah recently attempted to build a prototype voltage-gated drug release mechanism using one of my standard nanofluidic transistors. When she turned on her circuit (pictured below), instead of getting voltage-dependent diffusion behavior, she instead saw electro-osmosis. We’ve been debating what…

  Overview I burst pressure tested TEM chips with 1×1 mm windows of 100 nm SiO2 that were both annealed and unannealed (provided by JP and Josh Miller). In our experience it seems that the forming gas (H2/N2) annealed chips…

We used chips from the latest 5 slot SepCon NPN wafer 1142 (14%, 36nm) to test our ability to separate 20 nm  “blue  fluorescent” polystyrene NPs from Invitrogen from IgG. We used a concentration of 10^14 particles/ml NPs and 1…

In this post we look at the effect of altering the area available for filtration on a standard 5 slot SepCon.  Karl and I did this by simply cutting gaskets such that they covered different regions of the surface of…