This is the first post I have made with respect to the project proposed by Mark Dumont of the department of Biochemistry and Biophysics. As a reminder of the scope of the project Mark has shown an interest in using our pnc-Si membranes to separate detergent from trans-membrane proteins during the process of preparing samples…
Just wanted to post an update on the creation of a counter flow system using the pncSi chips from wafer 619 (the wafer with the etched trenches for the insertion of capillary tubing). Over the past few weeks Henry and I have been able to produce a few functional counter flow systems using UV Ozone…
Based on the results obtained yesterday with the closed flow cell we reran another trial today. The closed flow system we tested today was bound using UV Ozone treatment, surprisingly this system created a relatively strong bond despite our resent results. Once the UV Ozone treatment was complete and the system had bound vacuum grease…
Yesterday Dean, the student from RIT, came over to help us set up our Anodic Bonder. Once we get the proper leads and connections we will be able to perform these bonding trials whenever we want without needing to travel over to RIT. In the meantime we have continued our work with PDMS, and our…
Yesterday Henry and I went over to RIT to perform anodic bonding and parylene deposition using the new membrane configuration of W619 (with the etched trenches for our capillary tubing). I just wanted to post a summary of the process that was done yesterday, as we encountered numerous problems, in the hopes that we can…
Following the advice of Dave and Chris I ran a UV Ozone bonding trial yesterday with the stage temperature set to 100C (instead of the usual 25C). The idea behind the elevated stage temperature is to drive off any water vapor that might be within the UV Ozone chamber during the treatment process. At the…
A few weeks ago Dave dropped of a humidity monitor for the third floor equipment room. Since then I have been recording the humidity every time I run a UV Ozone process for PDMS-glass or PDMS-pncSi bonding and there seems to be a correlation between the two. Over the last week there seems to be…
Yesterday I started a test to try and reproduce the results Henry was able to obtain with a closed flow system last week. Using four samples (W619) I ran the UV Ozone bonding process and allowed them to sit over night. This morning I found that only one of the four samples was bonded; recently…
Just an update on the closed flow systems I put together yesterday using vacuum grease. Even with the vacuum grease at the point of entrance of the capillary tube to the PDMS-pncSi system the PDMS was able to get into the trough of the membrane chip. I will talk with Henry today to see what…
Just an update on the PDMS-pncSi closed flow systems progress… The issues we were having early last week with bonding seem to have been solved. We used to run extra ozone flow for ten minutes after the initial 5minutes of UV Ozone. As it turns out this is unnecessary, we are able to get nearly…