Thanks to SiMPore’s push for TEM grids, we’ve produced a lot of amorphous material in the last month under different deposition conditions. Below I’ve illustrated the different film structures resulting from depositing with and without substrate bias and heating. Without bias, the amorphous film exhibits clusters of thicker/denser? material (darker spots). Intuitively, this makes sense…
Christine and I have been using the present Corning 24-well plate definition in the Tecan for our experiments so far. Yesterday I placed a pnc-Si chip in the (approximate) middle on the bottom of 1 of the 24-wells. I did a 500nm absorbance scan in a circular pattern (15×15 points) – to get data similar…
The last few times the spinned PDMS layers were much more uniform. The first picture below is with 1:100 diluted PDMS layer coated on it and the second one is a clean sample from the same wafer for comparison. The PDMS layer on the first picture is approximately 60nm thick. The measured thikness produced by…
Before starting my transport project with the use of the Tecan, it was important to see how the Tecan worked with the sepcon and transwell kept in the well plate. The goals from this experiment were to: 1. Test for fluorescence from the plastic. 2. See if fluorescence from the apical side has an affect…
My previous post on Electroomosis theory describes the deviation between expected and calculated zeta potential using the Smoluchowski equation. In this post I will explain another method of solving for the zeta potential and I will consider the mistakes made in the previous calculations. In a paper by Kim(Mukhtar) in J. Membrane Sci. (1996), the…
Jim and I were wondering if we could “image” the membrane windows with the Tecan. A nice thing about the Tecan is that you can specify the number of measurements per well. For example, in this study, I acquired a 10×10 matrix of fluorescence intensities in a “filled circle” pattern (see below). You can also…
The pump’s data sheet (located here) describes the pumps materials as: polyphenylene sulphone (PPSU) polyimide (PI) nitrile butadiene rubber (NBR) It also says that the acceptable particle tolerance is < 50 μm. This is the info we will need to determine the types of particles we can use with an in-line flow system.
I repeated Barrett’s discoloration array experiment (Array1, Array2). NaCl solution was prepared @ concentrations: 0, 0.25 (0.1), 0.5 and 1M, whereas NaHCO3 solution was prepared @ 0, 0.475, 0.95, 1.90 (and 3.80) mg/ml. Different combinations of both these salt solutions were used and discoloration of non treated samples in oven@ 37C was monitored over different…
This post explains that electroosmosis in our material is higher than we expected. Jim suggested that maybe we don’t have fully developed flow in our thin material. Here I attempt to find the entrance length, or distance until fully developed flow, in our material. One needs to keep in mind that this is a continuum…
I recently completed a HUVEC adhesion study with commercial PET and pnc-Si transwells. HUVEC were seeded @ 100000 cells/cm^2, allowed to attach for 5 hours (upside down format) and then stained with CMFDA. Images were acquired without autocontrast, but I did autocontrast them in ImageJ to make them brighter. Corning Costar PET transwell: pnc-Si transwell…