Word Document: Blog Write Up 4.8.19 Over the past two weeks I have been working on creating a protocol to eliminate the organic debris from environmental water samples, leaving only microplastics behind on the silicon filters. The goal for this is to be able to really isolate out just the plastic in environmental samples making…
One advantage of our slot nanomembranes is that we can readily image microparticulate debris with simple light microscopy. With that in mind, it should be straightforward to have some image processing along with our microspectroscopy to separate out different particles on the membrane. I used WEKA segmentation (a feature of Fiji) to identify a few…
We have long maintained that we can capture more analyte from a sample using a flow-through configuration compared to a tangential configuration. We can confirm this view quantitatively by measuring the amount of material captured on the membrane with equal source flow rates. Additionally, one of the advantages of a silicon-based platform is that we can…
A collaborator of mine is interested in arranging quantum dots on a surface to demonstrate something called super irradiance. All of the sub-resolution particles could emit as one object (think laser) if the conditions are just so. Ideally, a bunch of quantum dots would be stacked closely together (but not touching) in a repeating fashion….
MATLAB updated the way that it creates GUI applications back in 2015, and it is increasingly becoming more functional. Over the years I have been here, we have had more than a few requests to use our pore processing software. I have sent it out, but it’s not as intuitive for some people to use…
Summary I need to replace the function of my breath to get water into the femtoliter sized cavity of the monolithic device. I achieve this using a small stream of ethanol vapor as a precursor, and then replace the ethanol with water. Once the chips are wet, they should be reasonably stable until they can…
Alec and Elysia’s study on the migration of infectious bugs through microporous silicon nitride has been useful, however, the size range of the pores is not sufficient to halt the migration. To create smaller pore sizes, I infilled the chips from Wafer 4695 (600 nm pores) with SiO2 depositions. Deposition Settings 350 C Aluminum Holder…
We want to create a structure that can more easily control the electric field inside of the Monolith cavities, by adding an electrode specific to each well. My solution is to create a hybrid film stack, replacing some of the SiO2 spacer with a gold layer that is in fluidic contact on the walls of…
Kyle has made some progress using the monolith chips, however, the wetting of these chips is difficult and makes the monoliths unattractive to use. I have attempted to create a more replicable wetting protocol. We’ve heard over the summer that other groups have used an autoclave to inundate tiny nanostructures with water (like a nano-scale…
Background: At the end of August, Greg Schmidt and I were investigating the feasibility of a project that builds off of my PhD research: templating and patterning new materials on top of NPN/microporous nitride. We hope to make composite nanomembranes with various ratios of NPN to sputtered thin films. In addition to my normal TEM,…