A lone link

Looking at the induced-charge electroosmosis literature (blob at left) and the nanopore literature (blob at right) through some key papers, it seems that there aren’t very many connections between those areas yet. The green square represents one of the first papers on ICEO by Squires and Bazant in 2004, and the blue square is Siwy’s …

Summer 2014 Independent Study Wrapup

We had four independent study* students this past summer. Students met weekly in the boardroom to troubleshoot and perfect their plans for world domination. Three of the projects provided new materials for our embedded systems course while helping out with our research, and one was a more classic research project where we needed a computer simulation done. …

It’s been an epic summer for U-Haul

July and August of 2014 saw many changes in the neighborhood. -We are now sharing a lab with Dr. Stuart J. Williams from Mechanical Engineering! He has moved on up (literally upstairs) and seems very excited about finally having a fume hood. We have previously been on committees together, sometimes attend the same conferences, and he taught …

Painting with nanoplates

We recently developed a microfluidic method for patterning light-absorbing nanomaterials on MEMS (microelectromechanical systems). The technique relies on a chemical bond between the surface and nanoplates from the O’Toole group, plus microfluidic channels to control where the nanoplates go. Figures (a) through (d) are electron microscope images at various size scales, and figure (e) shows an optical …