NRG

This is a reprisal of the old post. While manufacturer declares particles to be 5, 10, etc, they do however give a measured average to their particles in the written material they provide.  I did not have that in the last chart.  Here I also add the standard deviation of TEM and Malvern data (as…

Last week a set of four wafers was processed at four different RTP temperatures (1000, 950, 900, 850 C).  Unfortunately, the yield across these wafers was low due to possible metal contamination in the film and etch issues.  However, the TEMs still show a range of porosities and pore sizes across the different thermal treatments….

I have been using MatLab to analyze the pores in the SC wafers. Here are the results from my analyses: To take a first look, I simply plotted four characteristics: average pore size, porosity, cut-off pore size, and mean roundness against the wafer number. Notice that the blue dots are the b wafers. Excel would…

I have been working with Barrett to test two different assays with BSA. One is a standard procedure for microtiter plates and the other is a microassay procedure for microtiter plates. Here is a brief summary of each procedure: Standard Procedure for Microtiter Plates– linear range is 0.05 mg/ml to 0.5 mg/ml Prepare a diluted…

A few weeks ago, I posted discoloration results on carbonized membranes here.  It was 6 weeks yesterday since I started this experiment, so I decided to stop it (few, if any, cell applications require 6-weeks of culture).   These were SC141 chips in the flat (not transwell) format.  I also used DMEM with high NaHCO3 levels. …

I repeated the first degradation experiment (posted here) to confirm the results.  I also tracked discoloration of the samples this time.  As before, I used 1X PBS, but this time, the entire assay was performed in the 37C oven. Discoloration pictures: The PSi sample starts with a new rainbow coloration and then completely discolors to…

For the last two weeks, we have observed that membranes have been wrinkling post-oxide strip.  After some investigation, it was determined that the cause of wrinkling was from a cracked SiO2 target in the sputter system. I also saw a suppression of pore formation in the wrinkled films as compared to an unwrinkled membrane. The…

Originally, I created the following figure to visualize the relationship between sieving coefficient and molecular weight: (originally from this post) I can now take the protein dimensions that I obtained from crystal structures (posted here) and replot this figure: In this version of the figure the sigmoidal shape of the curve is even more obvious…

Anant and I found a protocol in Biomaterials a few weeks ago that allows colorimetric determination of silicic acid.  It was used to track the degradation of PSi samples in Tris-HCl buffer. I optimized this protocol and got standard linear curves, as reported in the protocols section of the blog here.  Here, I report the…