The highly anticipated 3rd generation etch cell has arrived. NY Manufacturing did a great job with the design and fabrication. To give an idea of how far we’ve come, I’ve placed previous etch cells next to the newest.
One of the major improvements is the introduction of a drain. We no longer have to lift the entire cell to empty the EDP, but simply loosen bolts sealing the cell to the wafer. This should make clean-up exponentially easier.
Hi all! Above is an image of the bioreactor made from the square, 5-slit pnc-Si chip and a PDMS structure. Fused-silica capillary tubings were inserted into the bioreactor to form the inlet and the outlet for the transfer of the cells into the lower compartment, which is made entirely out of PDMS. Note that the…
I used the following parameters in the Simple Sieving Model (pardon the MATLAB syntax) Am = 1; %cross sectional area in cm^2 Do = 1*10^-7;% diffusion coefficient in the membrane in cm^2/sec P = .15;% membrane porosity; t = linspace(0,420,500); %time vector sec Qo = 1*0.00166; %militers per second (0.00166 = 10 ul/min) L =…
Another one of the questions I’ve been trying to answer with regard to endothelial cell vacuoles is whether membrane mechanics or permeability drive vacuole expression. I’ve thought of several experimental designs to test this that haven’t worked (i.e., using very small volumes on the apical side to minimize permeability, using PDMS plugs to block the…
My previous discoloration post showed that chips in the Sepcon format discolored much slower than flat chips. A flat chip in the same well as a Sepcon chip seemed to accelerate discoloration. One thing about the Sepcon format that I hadn’t thought of earlier was that pnc-Si in Sepcons is autoclaved for sterility. So I…
Tom gave me a few samples to scan on the AFM. PVP was added to the well side of the samples. I scanned the pnc-Si side of the chips to see if/how the PVP came through the pores. Samples were from SC114. Two different areas of supported pnc-Si membrane on control (no PVP) chip: The…
I’ve prepared a few slides of discoloration data for tomorrow. The images didn’t copy over from the blog very well, but I think they are good enough for a discussion. labmeeting_oct211