Glue bonds to nonstick surfaces and wipes clean with ethanol
cen.acs.org
cen.acs.org
These sorts of environmental impact blurbs are hilarious. What kind of scenario are they envisioning where someone wants to remove and reuse a specialized adhesive bonding PTFE parts to something, but don't have ethanol on hand and have to fall back to using hand sanitizer?
[1] https://bsi-inc.com/sds_pdf/sds_un_cure.pdf
Acetone only dries out the top skin layers, which immediately triggers a healing response and accelerates the shed cycle. Dermatologists use acetone prior to skin surgery to speed up the recovery.
It’s extremely safe. Your body naturally creates it and you exhale and piss it out every day. If you are having any long term health issues from exposure then this may indicate that your immune system is seriously compromised.
As a chemist it’s a highly polar, very high boiling point solvent that is the “go to” when you can’t find a solvent your reactants dissolve in.
Acetone is less polar, more chemically reactive and lower boiling point. It’s rarely used as a reaction solvent due to its reactivity, but it is common in crystallizations.
Both are quite non-toxic (your body makes small amounts of acetone!), but I recall a cancer risk with high exposures of DMF (the example was tannery workers who sprayed it without any safety gear and got soaked).
Superglue doesn't work on Teflon, or most plastics you want it to work on. Wanting to glue plastic things together isn't exactly a niche need. Being able to remove that glue with hand sanitizer would be wonderful.
At the same time, superglue's brittle, meaning if you handle objects that were glued together, they're eventually gonna come apart in your hands. There's a reason smartphone screens use some special mystery glue not CA.
The problem with acetone is that you can't really get the solvent to the surface that's glued, since that's often inside the object, so it's really tricky to use. It's also toxic and attacks basically everything that's plastic or painted, resulting in a lot of damage.
AFAIK, smartphone glues tend to be acrylic adhesives, which are just as brittle as cyanoacrylate. They get around this by not bonding the screen directly to the chassis with the glue, but having the adhesive carried on tape.
In the mysterious future, I might have a widget that needs to be disassembled which uses this glue.
And I'm at the shop right now; as I look around the bench, I don't see any industrial products that are primarily ethanol. It's just not something we typically have a use for.
But there is a giant pump-bottle of hand sanitizer that is still right there by the doorway as a holdover from the COVID days. So if this adhesive ever begins to show up in products, and if hand sanitizer is Good Enough, then I'll be using that.
It saves a trip to the hardware store for gallon-sized can of "denatured alcohol" (which is typically very heavy with methanol at an unspecified ratio), and it avoids questions about buying/having a bottle of Everclear from the liquor store.
I think it's worthwhile to mention the possibility of using hand sanitizer for this purpose.
Now for disassembly, hand sanitizer is usually intentionally thickened to be more of a gel, whereas alcohol will flow into tight spaces. If you're trying to dissolve a glue joint, ethanol or an ethanol water mixture will be orders of magnitude better at penetrating into the joint, and of course you can't dissolve glue you don't reach. So I still think you're gonna want a can of denatured alcohol on hand. It'll leave less residue too.
If that's not what is intended with the word, then what is? The transformative form of recycling, like when the soup cans from last night's dinner get sent off to China to make new cars out of?
Is that kind of recycling even possible with this substance?
The truth is nowadays you can just choose your favorite brand and they almost certainly have a correct, and good, adhesive selector.
For example, for loctite, you should just use: https://www.henkel-adhesives-selector.com/
It’s pretty clear people have no fucking clue what makes a good adhesive.
I’ll settle for just not seeing duct tape in the 10,000 places it doesn’t belong!!
That man is now dead, and ornaments are safe again. That guy was _enthusiastic_
EDIT 2: I think they are non-toxic and inert. But I tried to find my source for this and I am failing badly. so deleting this comment
EDIT: I agree they are very waste full since they do not live that long. I have owned three non-stick pans, my cast iron pans have outlived all of them by decades.
If it is scratched or heated above what it says on the label, then yes it is absolutely toxic.
I mean, I'm not too awful worried about it compared to my adventures in 3D printing (with its crusty PTFE Bowden tubes).
But I very deliberately have just exactly one Teflon-coated pan in my house, and it only gets used for exactly one purpose: Making scrambled eggs with a rubber spatula. (I like my eggs scrambled sometimes, and I'm not pro-enough to make it work with cast iron or stainless cookware.)
This one was very cheap, at Aldi; if it dies, it dies. I try to avoid spending too much money on cookware because whenever I live with other people, the tendency is for them to find some way to absolutely destroy it.
And by that, I mean like: I don't even know what temperature it is that copper gets drippy-melty at, but they managed to exceed it.
And if the scratch is deep enough, you could also be exposing the underlying fluoropolymer coating which contains chemical binding glues which are definitely not foodsafe
Also modern replacements like GenX and PFOA are dangerous because they are not inert
But it's a bit like how the DEA has to update their list of banned substances multiple times a month because people keep coming up with new designer drugs and "research chemicals" that aren't technically banned.
I think a broader umbrella term might be POPs (Persistent Organic Pollutants) though that might also be too broad to be useful. A lot of times it's their non-stick properties themselves that make them so toxic, especially to fish and smaller organisms.
The thread tape on all non-compression screw-type plumbing fittings is made of PTFE, and so is Gore-Tex.
I’m well aware of the danger of PFAS, my local watershed is contaminated with it from a 3M plant.
Also most pans nowadays have phased that out and use PFOA or GenX which are absolutely not inert.
It does not indicate that it can bond other very low or low polarity polymers, the most common being polypropylene and polyethylene, which there is no known adhesive that will bond strongly to those two polymers, arguably these 2 are much more common than flourocarbons.
The cyanoacrylate "claimed" solutions for polypropylene and polyethylene are very weak.
They should show results from oxidation, thermal stability, accelerated aging tests.
And I’m beyond skeptical anyone would carefully recover this gunk each even once for re-use outside some contrived lab demo.
> To test its adhesive strength, researchers first glued two untreated polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) plates by sandwiching molten CyclicFP-fmoc between them and letting it cool at room temperature for 10 min.
Also notable that the glue substance is reusable:
> Remarkably, a simple ethanol wash completely stripped CyclicFP-fmoc from the target PTFE plates, leaving no trace behind. The recovered adhesive proved repeatedly reusable, reliably maintaining its adhesive strength of ~1.2 ± 0.1 MPa across multiple cycles.
Perhaps hot glue guns are going to get an update ;)
But I'd like to take this opportunity to present my semi-annual rant about hot glue (edit: from a hot glue gun), instead.
It's amazing stuff. It's similar to many other liquid adhesives in that you can stick things together with it (probably not PTFE, but...), and they stay pretty well stuck.
But it's got this really neat property that most other things lack: When used with non-porous surfaces, it's removable. A few drops of isopropyl alcohol will eek in between the glue and the surface it is stuck to. It stays solid, but basically just falls right off with no apparent mess.
...which makes it absolutely fantastic for temporary fixturing.
Like: Glue an accelerometer to the middle of the 3D printer bed for resonance tuning using a very thin layer of hot glue, and then just use a bit of isopropyl to take it off later. It's like it never happened.
Which ones have this property, and which ones do not? How do we tell them apart?
How do I identify the cheap hot glue that came with the cheap hot glue gun that I bought at Dollar General on a Saturday afternoon in 2021? It does this business just fine.
When redoing the wiring for one reason or another, it's trivially easy to peel the switch off with a screwdriver and remove the glue.
There isn't a compellingly better way of attaching that switch there. It has mounting screw holes but they point in the wrong direction, into the cavity. To screw it down, I would need some sort of long risers that somehow attach to the bottom of the cavity and are firm enough to resist the side to side push. Little L-brackets could work that attach to the side of the cavity. It's a very small cavity: hard to screw such brackets in, but that can be solved. Even if the brackets themselves were permanently mounted, not having to be removed when the switch is taken out, it would still take more time than with the glue.
Another use I have for glue is to secure a household internet connection. It's just a thin wire coming out of a RJ jack in the wall, in a room where kids play. The installer didn't crimp the plug into the cable insulation. The situation is that the insulation ends a few millimeters before the RJ plug, leaving a couple of bare wires that seem like 22 AWG crimped in. I "kid-proofed" this with hot glue. Hot glue is all over that plug, and about two feet of the cable is basically encased in hot glue, attached to the switch plate and along the wall right until the point it goes behind some furniture. I check on it from time to time to repair any tearing away.
I use teflon (sometimes nylon, but mostly teflon) painter pyramids/holders/etc, because i spray finish stuff that is very good at adhering to lots of things, and are acetone based - VOC compliance pretty much forced acetone into solvent based stuff. This in turn pretty much makes finishes melt into anything except PE, nylon, teflon, even if they wouldn't otherwise.
To keep the pyramids and things where i want them, i have magnets glued into them. But because it's PFTE, the magnets don't really stay adhered well, even with (currently) specialized adhesives and i end up regluing them after every few times, often before the project finishes.
What i really want is an adhesive like this one, where i can glue the magnets in, but also remove them after the project finishes, because i'll go soak the pyramids in solvent or something to clean them, but don't want to damage any magnet coatings.
PE sticks to itself and not much else. Packing tape is PE and adhesive. Apply PE tape to the printer bed before printing.
PPS is not that expensive if you know some of the more specialized filament vendors.
Anyway like I said my use case is weird and may even be transient.
I can think of other use cases, but most are coatings related (Ie using Teflon as a removable masking material, etc).
The removability is actually much less interesting than the ability to strongly bond Teflon.
The question I have is how long will it be till the report comes out indicating that DuPont has been dumping this product and intermediate compounds into local waterways. I give it 15 years?
Yes, let's do that, this time.
Sounds like a super-cool and useful molecule, but externalities can be killer.
s/^/This /Yes, plenty. Especially if it sticks well while needed, and then can be non-destructively undone when no longer needed.