In preparation for the ICNMM conference next summer (and more immediately, the paper they’ve requested by January) I’ve started thinking about what our membranes can offer extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO. This post will begin with some background information that I think is particularly important and progress into what work I’ve done so far on…
A little while back I posted a design for a capture device that would (nominally) work for dialysis on real patients. Due to strict requirements to avoid clotting, the design included a lot of curves and nuanced structures that would be no problem for a lithographical or molding method, but which are a step too…
Down the road, we’re going to move towards large-animal studies to test our hemodialyzers, since a large animal model (either a sheep or a pig, preferably the former) allows us to model the effects of complete kidney failure (as opposed to just uremia in rats) and work on a scale that would be comparable to…
As part of our work on the NSF STTR grant for our hemodialysis device, we need to develop a device to incorporate our liftoff membranes into to facilitate the fluidics. In this post (and likely, in another post later this month,) I will chronicle my contribution to this aspect of the project: finite element modeling of…
We’ve had quite a bit of success transferring nanoporous membranes now, but a lot of questions about the exact nature of the physics at work during the transfer process remain. Pursuant to those questions, we wanted to try changing a variable — switching from nanopores to micropores — to see how that changes the behavior of…
Recently, SiMPore has been working on a new chip design which involves incomplete etches on both sides in order to create a fluidic system built directly into the silicon, consisting of many long, shallow trenches. These trench chips are designed to obviate the need for silicone gaskets on one side of the chip, reducing the…
We’ve made a few academic inquiries so far into the theory which governs our nanoporous membrane transfer, but engineers as we are, the pace of our practical knowledge has outstripped that of our theoretical understanding. Here, I want to share a summary of what we know about these transferred membranes from a practical perspective, oriented…
This post is a followup to my previous post, which can be found here. When last I posted, I shared a handful of videos showing membranes transferred onto glass with water vapor being wetted in shear, and noted how the wet-dry interface tended to rend them apart and/or drag them along them surface. I provided…
Pertaining to the tenting work that Greg and I have been doing, some of the experiments discussed on my last post have given us reason to believe that the transferred membranes may not adhere well to silicon oxide, floating just above it rather than sticking to it. As a test for the stability of the…
Summary Since our last attempt, Greg and I have been attempting to refine our tenting experiments with the goal of demonstrating that we’re able to hydrate the volume underneath a nanoporous tent. This latest experiment is very similar to our previous experiment in theory, but we made some key changes which are discussed herein. Most…