Chemical Stability of Integrated Nano-Technologies Developer
This post relates to the ongoing project and potential grant between Integrated Nano-Technologies, Simpore, and NRG. The goal of my research is to show that our membranes can be integrated into Nano-Technologies’ device. Our membranes must be able to filter out or hold back large debris that can cause false positives in their device, while allowing their nano-gold “clusters” and gold developer to pass through. The first test I performed was to see the chemical stability of our membranes with the developer of Nano-Technologies. Below are pictures over the course of 18 days that show the stability of 3 different silicon chips. Water is used as a negative control, while DMEM is used as a positive control.
It is clear that the developer shows little to no degradation for the first two days. It is important to not that DMEM shows significant degradation at this point. Around the third day there are some small but significant degradation effects. However, over the course of the next two weeks, this degradation progresses very minimally. Over the course of this experiment, water chips see no degradation. The result is that the developer is very stable in the the short term (2 days), and moderately stable from there on out. For the purpose of our membrane integration into Nano-Technologies’ device, this should be sufficient, as our membranes would only be exposed to developer for no more than a half an hour.
The next post will show our membrane’s capability to pass developer and nano-gold “cluster.”