W620: Mechanical Testing

Many, many thanks to Kilean Lucas and Brian McIntyre who enabled our metrology. We have desired to get 3d information about the structure of our nanopores. One method to do so is known as electron tomography, a technique which can reconstruct volumes and surfaces from sets of tilted images. By identifying dense regions of contrast…

As I told at the meeting, I tried spincoating PDMS on the membrane and it worked without breaking membrane. To make an ultrathin polymer film by spincoating the polymer has to be diluted in the particular solvent first. I used PDMS with elastomer to curing agent ratio (10:1) diluted in hexane (and xylene) by weight…

Over the weekend, I resubmitted our adult Adipose-Derived Stem Cell (ADSC) paper titled: Membranes Promote Endothelial Differentiation of Adipose-Derived Stem Cells and Perivascular Interactions There were three main findings: 1.) ADSCs can be induced to express CD31 (PECAM-1) like endothelial cells.  a.) Several prior studies used Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF) at 50 ng/mL to…

Introduction In severe sepsis, a primary infection gives way to a maladaptive immune response leading to wide spread edema and multiple organ dysfunction. The initial infection can occur in many peripheral tissues throughout the body. The pathogen associated molecular patterns (e.g. LPS on gram-negative bacteria) interact with pattern recognizing receptors on resident macrophages and endothelial…

Because of the disagreement between the experimental and simulation comparison in this post, I decided to take a look at the Sterlitech membranes using SEM.  Barrett gave me a hand with all the images, and we tried to look at the edge for thickness and the pores for density/overlapping pores. In this first image, the…