Structured Membranes

Structured water layers adjacent to biological membranes.

Water amid the restricted space of crowded biological macromolecules and at membrane interfaces is essential for cell function, though the structure and function of this "biological water" itself remains poorly defined. The force required to remove strongly bound water is referred to as the hydration force and due to its widespread importance, it has been studied in numerous systems. Here, by u...

Microfluidic Synthesis of Designed Colloidal Particles Using Structured Elastomeric Membranes

We report a method for synthesizing various shaped colloidal microparticles using microfluidic devices with structured elastomeric membranes. These elastomeric membranes incorporated between two-layered channels have negative relief structures, and pneumatically actuated membrane leads to confinement of fluid inside structures. Using this microfluidic system, we demonstrate synthesis of various...

Confined Electroconvective Vortices at Structured Ion Exchange Membranes

In this paper, we investigate electroconvective ion transport at cation exchange membranes with different geometry square-wave structures (line undulations) experimentally and numerically. Electroconvective microvortices are induced by strong concentration polarization once a threshold potential difference is applied. The applied potential required to start and sustain electroconvection is stro...

Supported membranes on chemically structured and rough surfaces.

We present a general linear response description of membrane adhesion at rough or chemically structured surfaces. Our method accounts for nonlocal Van der Waals effects and contains the more approximate (and local) Deryagin approach in a simple limit. Specializing to supported membranes we consider the effects of substrate structure on the membrane adhesion energy and configuration. Adhesion is...

Novel Carriers for Nano-Structured Material Through Membranes