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Using Resistance Measurements to Ensure Al2O3 Film Integrity
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 this means, but I contend that this means the insulating alumina film coating the silver…
Wafers 620/621
Today I etched wafer 621, which is the pair to 620. While w620 has a relatively low pinhole density, w621 shows a much higher occurence of defects. Since the front-end processing and thermal treatment was identical for these wafers, I believe that the variability lies in the etch process. Looking at the two wafers side-by-side,…
Barcikowski Collaboration Update
Over the last week or so I’ve taken some lovely SEM pictures with Joe, used the light scatter, and ran some separations on filters I assembled myself. Someone from the Barcikowski lab, Dr. Rehbock, got in touch with me and sent me an updated description of the four samples they’re sending and what they want…
Monitoring Diffusion to Equilibrium
In this post I show the sieving coefficients of simulations with a thin membrane, a thick membrane, or a no membrane case as they approach equilibrium. The simulations were carried out for 48 hours, and plotted for 1 hour time points. Both thin and thick membrane had the same pore distribution – monodisperse 10 nm…
The Concentration of the Barcikowski Peptide is at the Lower Bound of Our Detection Limit
Recall that we’ve been having a great deal of trouble following the free ligand during our separations of the Bioconjugated Barcikowski particles, and that this trouble also means we can’t see the ligand after centrifuging the pure sample. In the interest of thoroughness, I replicated the assay the Barcikowski lab used to quantify the unbound…
Bonding PDMS to SU-8, from URNano Workshop
This is the method Brian McIntyre developed for the recent URNano Microfluidics Workshop. Based on a polyaddition-based mechanism based on introducing amine groups onto the surface of one material and epoxy groups on another material and enabling the amine–epoxide polyaddition reaction at their closely contacted solid-to-solid interface to establish a covalent and permanent bonding presented in…