Calculated and experimental molar flow – porosity dependence

Silicon nanomembranes are ultrathin, free-standing structures that vary from 10 – 100 nm in thickness. These membranes are at least 1 order of magnitude thinner than the thinnest polymeric membranes. Pores can be manufactured on these membranes to have diameters ranging from 5 nm – 10 μm with porosities ranging from 2 – 20%, allowing…

I’ve processed all the images used in the water permeability studies and found the following statistics from these images: Mean Diameter Mean Area Median Diameter Median Area Porosity Area Weighted Diameter 90th percentile Diameter I calculated the theoretical water permeability for each sample we’ve used and compared that to the experimental permeability using these statistics…

Cellulose Membranes I set up a 24 hour diffusion experiment with Millipore 30kD cellulose membranes as shown in this picture: After 24 hours I collected retentate and filtrate and visualized on the following gel: I didn’t expect to see a separation so similar to our pnc-Si results in this format considering the extremely poor dialysis…

In my last diffusion experiment, I used wafer SC 442. The results seemed to show that IgG was indeed diffusing through the membrane. As a follow up experiment, I am trying to show that I can pass IgG through more than just the one membrane. Furthermore, SC 505 has a much larger average pore size…

In this post I take a look at the flux of molecules through the 1-D membrane simulations.  I will then use this flux to compare to systems lacking a membrane. First off, how to find the flux.  Inside the membrane, the Flux = -Dm dc/dx.  Unfortunately this is extremely hard to calculate because of the…

Last week I etched three wafers of different silicon thicknesses (10 nm, 15 nm, 20 nm). All the wafers had a TEOS mask with the standard three layer sputtered film on the front. Not that surprising is the fact that the thinnest membrane showed pores while the 15 and 20 nm membranes did not at…