Lab Floors Getting Cleaned on Feb 22

On Monday I presented our progress on the hemodialysis project for the Coulter Foundation. They seemed very pleased with our progress and impressed with our team. Its a tough crowd and for the first time, I sensed they had confidence in us. I’ve uploaded my presentation to the blog (PDF; ppt). Their primary points of…

My PhD exam was postponed (tentatively to early September but it’s up in the air still) due to an impending bureaucratic nightmare, so for the last few weeks I have been running more filter experiments, and I have discovered some interesting trends. While it is generally the case in nanopore experiments that the average dwell…

Now that we have a number of ways to quantify the nanostructure of different npMgF2/npAu film stacks, we can begin an optimization experiment for which combination of factors will be useful to us. To explore the space of outcomes, we have a set of Factors at a certain number of Levels. These produce a set…

I briefly experimented with the track-etched membranes this morning and found that they are extremely fragile and near impossible to cut. I disassembled a few of the microcons and found that a circular piece of paper the size of a hole punch (like the one on the bench by the mac) fits perfectly into the…

Can viscosity be determined by dynamic light scattering?  Dynamic light scattering in essence measures the diffusion of particles and calculates the hydrodynamic radius using the Stokes-Einstein relation, D = kT/(6πηr).  To find a size using dynamic light scattering, you need to input the viscosity so it can perform the calculation.  If we don’t give the…

Introduction After completing my experiments on burst pressure of HD membranes, I started the experiments on finding the burst pressure of 3-channel nitrite chips by using the airgas cylinder. This experiment is to investigate if soaking in viscous fluid will significantly weaken the membrane and lead to burst. The chip was placed on the center…