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…
Summary: Annealing to above glass transition T (200 C) doesn’t reduce film stress. Adjusting post-exposure bake protocol seems to reduce it. A short post to document my efforts at reducing tensile stress in SU-8-3000 coatings by annealing in vacuum to its glass transition temperature (200 °C according to MicroChem). This is in relation to the…
Simpore produced a wafer of 50 nm NPN with a matrix of (4) widths X (5) lengths Widths of 100 um, 300 um, 500 um, and 700 um Lengths of 1 mm, 1.5 mm, 2 mm, 2.5 mm and 3 mm Each chip has one membrane. These are the dimensions of the membranes. Using the burst…
Figure 1. A) A TEM image of a SiN nanomembrane. Circles with a rim are pores that span the thickness of the membrane, while grey patches are pits in the surface. B) A pore size histogram generated using image processing software shows that the average minor axis (the restricting axis) is ~ 50 nm. …
This is the final post (hopefully) summarizing my simulation results I did to model Endohm system. Barrett used endohm cup system to do the coculture of bEnd3 and glial cells for his BBB studies. The resistance values obtained while using pncSi and uniformly porous membrane for cell growth were drastically different, and it was not very…
I have been having problems getting smoothed sheets of nanomembrane on my little oxide structures. I tried a number of different ways to delaminate the membrane, using tweezers to poke the membrane especially, but had little success getting smoothed sheets. I tried compressing the two chips together using the burst pressure clamp, then poking it…
I have lost many chips during my MgF2 or Au or Pt process due to yield problems with my RIE. I have wondered if the problem was due to power spikes. I have observed that my most poorly yielding etch runs usually have uneven power or power spikes during the run. Increasing window size (active area)…
Hi all, For the past one month I have been working on a height-based device for culturing bEnd3 (mouse brain endothelial cells) under flow. Ideally, this device is to constitute a blood brain barrier (BBB) mimetic. Device Full View (Front): The fluid flow is driven by hydrostatic pressure, created through the differences in the…
Cell Culture on the CO2 exchange Devices The system becomes more complicated with the addition of cells. Tejas Khire cultured HUVECS in a device that had an inverted design to the one pictured above. (The cells were plated on the top portion (well side) of the nanomembrane with media and the bottom (flat side)of the membrane was…
I have been trying to verify that my MgF2 material is cytocompatible (e.g. no different than tissue culture plastic), and attempted Live/Dead staining to confirm. The following images are from P6 HUVECs with Invitrogen L3224 Live/Dead stain on MgF2, NPN, and tissue culture plastic after ~96 hours. The devices were initially seeded at 5e5 cells/mL,…