The purpose of the fluidics in our hemodialysis system is to move the sample to and the retentate away from the membranes. The dialysate (permeate, filtrate) will be handled passively in the initial designs and therefore do not require fluidic manipulation. The parameters influencing the movement of the sample past the membranes include channel geometry…
In the last post, we have discussed the intermediate state of the membranes which shows the irregular shape pores and silicon nanocrystals after annealed at 700C. Last week I did a quick test on the same nitride membrane with a different annealing process to verify this intermediate state. I run two different heat treatments. The…
This is the first set of studies to assess the hemocompatibility of pncSi surfaces based on the paper by Fissell and Roy. It looks for the behavior of platelets in the plasma upon interaction with pncSi surfaces. Biological Motivation: Platelets are one of the most important components of the human immune system and also one…
The minimum essential medium elution assay with neutral red is a commonly used method for determining the cytotoxicity of a material, typically polymers1-4. The neutral red dye is only endocytosed by viable cells; relative viability can be determined by absorbance measurements from solutions of the extracted dye. After several weeks in the lab stabilizing the…
In this post, I would like to sum up all different annealing scenarios, which corresponding to different morphologies of the pnc-Si membrane so far we have observed. It should be very helpful to understand the evolution of the pore formation during the annealing. This whole evolution I believe, not only applies to the oxide/silicon/oxide stack,…
Now we already confirmed that pores are able to form in both oxide/silicon/oxide and nitride/silicon/nitride system. Here comes an interesting question- how about nitride/silicon/oxide and oxide/silicon/nitride system? In the past week, another two different stacks including SiN(30nm)/ a-Si(25nm)/SiO2(30nm) and SiO2(30nm)/a-Si(25nm)/SiN(30nm) were tested. The nitride film was deposited with 25 W bias and the silicon with…
Last week, I deposited silicon nitride/ amorphous silicon/ silicon nitride stack and then annealed the free standing stack after etching the substrate. The nitride film was deposited with 25W bias and the silicon film with 5W bias. The thickness for the nitride film is 30nm where it is 25nm for silicon. One of the initial…
On the 13th of September we reviewed our recent progress on EO. Maryna and Jirachai (Borkholder group) gave presentations. I’ve uploaded PDF files of each of their presentations. Maryna’s presentation: MarynaEO Jarachai’s presentation: EO_Testing_Report (PPT) EO_Testing_Report (PDF) Bubble formation in electrolytic cells
Hi All, This is my first blog on the NRG group. I am working on testing the biocompatibility and of PEGylated pncSi surfaces. To start with, I and Nakul began with checking the activation status of neutrophils on PEG treated glass cover slips. So here are details of the experiment we performed. Hypothesis: PEG treated…
I tried putting Ag/AgCl electrodes on the surfaces of the membrane for EO pumping. The experiments were done in RIT with Jirachai. In these experiments the goal was to observe the change in liquid droplet volume on the front side of the membrane, due to EO pumping from liquid reservoir on the other side of…