Attempts at Closed Flow System
I wanted to update everyone on the recent attempts at the formation of the a closed flow system by bonding PDMS to our membrane chips, using capillary tubing for the inlet and outlets. Last week when we tried to preform the UV Ozone bonding it was unsuccessful. I initially thought the bonding did not occur because I forgot to clean the membranes prior to the bonding attempt.
Yesterday I preformed the same bonding process over again using a new batch of PDMS and fresh membrane chips, which I cleaned with an ethanol and DI-water rinse prior to bonding. As usual I allowed the systems to sit overnight to enable bond formation. When I checked them this morning none of the systems were bound. These results a puzzling since last week we reported that we were able to bond PDMS to our membrane chips, but this week we have been unable to reproduce those results.
Today I am going to try to get PDMS to bond to our silicon material to verify that the result from last week was not an anomaly. Pending these results I will then continue in the attempts at creating a closed flow system using PDMS.