With the help of Henry and Greg, the Fisher team has been busy learning the basics. John and Ryan have learned some PDMS microfluidics-making and will have their first chips ready on Tuesday. We have also been playing with the silhouette printer, studying our options for producing some simple devices. Finally, we produced some chip designs to have a mask made asap.
Pint Silicon Supercapacitor Tejas sent me an interesting article about Silicon-based supercapacitors. I have made a previous post on potential uses for our membranes as separators in EDLC (electrical double layer capacitors), and one of the problems I posited was that the electrolyte chemistry seemed particularly inimical to silicon (KOH, Na2SO4). The authors in…
I repeated a previous experiment but this time I used samples (no RTP) from W685 in oven @ 37C in DMEM(-FBS). Four type of samples (blank chip with no slits, chip with both intact membranes, chip with one intact membrane and chip with both broken membranes) were used at different time points. Again the expected…
I have a preliminary result from Kevin that there is a layer of fluoropolymer remaining on my MgF2 freestanding nanomembranes (which could explain some of the carbon signal in EDX from my previous posts). This would create another unnecessary signal for the intended Raman spectroscopy application. Remembering an old graph from my schooling, I dropped…
In the field of gas permeance there is a plot called the “Robeson Plot” (the paper that debuted it) that is used to compare the separation behavior of various membranes made of different materials and measured in different systems. An example is pictured: Various literature data for the log permeability of H2 gas versus the…
Today Barrett and I processed SiO2 deposition at RIT. This process was actually delayed due to the cleanroom scrubber failure last week. We deposited 30nm SiO2 on both sides of three wafers, #335, 341, and 345. Earlier in March, I tried 20nm and 40nm SiO2. It was found that 40nm SiO2 is so thick that…
As part of Aim 1 of my PhD, I am looking into mechanical characterization of ultrathin membranes to explore the effects of porosity on the structural integrity and determine how porous we can go with a porous membrane, and last but not least, to quantify the mechanical robustness of Parylene membranes. Recently, the BME department…