As we make larger and larger pores, we see that they are becoming more convoluted and have stopped looking like circles or ellipse. In order to try describing these shapes, they were given a “roundness” number which was calculated by taking the minor axis and dividing it by the major axis. However this often fails…
In early May, the Barcikowski lab shipped us four samples of gold nanoparticles for us to run separations on. They took forever to get here, and had aggregated and precipitated by the time they arrived. About a week ago, the lab sent another batch of four samples (which differed slightly from the samples they sent…
What we’d like to have accompany the Sepcon filters is a general way to tune the pore sizes for any given separation. If, for instance, someone wanted to have a filter cutoff of 12nm, we could create a custom wafer with a mean pore size of roughly 17nm. But it would be much easier (and…
The samples of nanoparticles from the Barcikowski lab finally arrived after 9 days in transport. Regrettably, the ice pack they shipped with was completely dead, and it is possible that the samples were in some way ruined. After we received the shipment, I immediately ran a small amount of each sample in the DLS machine,…
It was speculated that the rate of diffusion through a charged membrane had a direct relationship with pressure – as pressure increases, the kinetic energy of the charged particles is more likely to overcome the electrostatic repulsion of the membrane, until at a high enough pressure the repulsive force is small enough to be ignored….
Over the last week or so I’ve taken some lovely SEM pictures with Joe, used the light scatter, and ran some separations on filters I assembled myself. Someone from the Barcikowski lab, Dr. Rehbock, got in touch with me and sent me an updated description of the four samples they’re sending and what they want…
As a rotation student from the Biophysics depart, I’ll be spending the next six weeks or so helping Dr. Stephan Barcikowski use the nanomembranes to do a number of separations as part of a nanofabrication procedure. Dr. Barcikowski makes extremely pure gold and platinum nanoparticles (~10nm) colloids using laser ablation and then bioconjugates them with…