The goal of our work is a low-cost, portable device that will perform rapid and efficient leukocyte count assays required for treatment of HIV positive patients. The device in mind will benefit from the advantages associated with microfluidic systems such as reduced reagent volume requirements and compact device format. It will utilize patterned microporous membranes…
Here is the paper I reviewed at the NRG meeting on 06/19. Utah Group Micro BBB Device I’ve also included my presentation: BBB Device Presentation This week I’m working on designing the basal and apical chambers, considering the necessary shear stresses.
Regarding the single channel dialyzer chip with 20-nm thick nano-porous silicon membrane: 10 mm long, 300 µm deep, 500 µm wide channels. Now that we’ve shown that a measurable quantity of urea is filtered out of DI water in one pass through the single channel dialyzer chip, we turn our attention to “Things Which Must…
Last time I showed that the sample with multi-annealing yielded higher porosity and larger average pore diameter than the sample with direct annealing. In this post, I further investigate the multi-annealing of free standing OSO stack (20/15/10) by varying the pre-annealing time. The heat treatment process is illustrated in the following figure. Free standing OSO…
Permeance of a sample was first calculated by taking a TEM image of the membrane and extracting pore size histograms. The flow rate through each pore can be calculated and then summed to determine the flow rate through the sample. The flow rate is then normalized by the pressure and surface area to calculate permeance…
The samples of nanoparticles from the Barcikowski lab finally arrived after 9 days in transport. Regrettably, the ice pack they shipped with was completely dead, and it is possible that the samples were in some way ruined. After we received the shipment, I immediately ran a small amount of each sample in the DLS machine,…
The main difficulty with creating a simulation of the single channel dialysis chip is that the membrane is so very thin (20 nm). This is especially true when compared to its length of 10 mm but also when compared to the channel depth and permeate well (which in our case is actually a beaker of…
There is a reliability/handling issue with the single slot chips. 0.5 mm x 10 mm slots, 20 nm thick membranes with 40 nm SiN reinforcement. The membranes are easily packaged in an upper fluidic PDMS layer with inlet/outlets and two PDMS struts (on the membrane side to protect from accidental contact breakage.) The first test…
It is well believed that the pore formation is directly related to the silicon crystallization. In this post, I’m gonna further show that how does the crystallization process affect the pore formation. The crystallization process can be divided into two stages. The first one is the nucleation of silicon atoms. In this stage, crystal nuclei…
We have suspected that those non-open pores in the TEM image of pnc-Si are pits in the silicon membrane for a long time. Last week, I SEMed a sample, oxide (30nm)/Si(25nm)/oxide(30nm) annealed at 800C for 1min, to verify the pits features. The first figure is a TEM image which the majority feature looks like non-open…