Glue bonds to nonstick surfaces and wipes clean with ethanol

114 points - last Thursday at 1:08 PM

Comments

culi today at 8:32 PM

There's an endless stream of non-stick pans in Goodwills. I feel bad for the people that don't know better and buy used non-stick pans and I also feed bad about the sheer amount of waste being generated. It would be incredible if this could be used to get rid of scratched up or otherwise unsafe non-stick coatings to the point that the pan is still food safe

murderfs today at 5:23 PM

> “Since ethanol is the main component of hand sanitizer, we believe it is possible to de-bond and recycle the adhesive by using hand sanitizer as a substitute in certain real-world situations,” Aida says.

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?

oflannabhra today at 4:48 PM

I guess one of my favorite old-school websites will need to get updated, ThisToThat [0].

[0] - https://www.thistothat.com

freediddy today at 7:00 PM

I'm thankful they are researching the environmental impact of this. The last thing we need is another PFAS debacle decades later.

ble today at 5:12 PM

Interesting that it seems like the application method is to melt the glue:

> 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 ;)

mint5 today at 5:55 PM

Yay more sources of weird forever chemicals. And while it’s been a long time since I had ochem, there’s quite a few places this molecule looks like it can break apart.

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.

ssl-3 today at 5:19 PM

I'm very impressed that they were able to use glue on PTFE for...approximately anything at all. That's impressive.

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.

eszed today at 6:36 PM

> it is imperative to study this molecule’s environmental fate and impact before pressing it into service.

Yes, let's do that, this time.

Sounds like a super-cool and useful molecule, but externalities can be killer.

bertjk today at 5:31 PM

At the risk of asking a really dumb question: Does this only work on PTFE or other flourine-compound surfaces?

pavel_lishin today at 3:32 PM

My mind immediately jumped to The Mote In God's Eye.

deleted today at 7:09 PM

oasisbob today at 5:02 PM

Isn't high-ductility associated with creep, especially under static loads? That would seem to be a downside of an adhesive like this.

bilsbie today at 5:43 PM

Could this be used for hanging things from walls without damaging them?

teddyh today at 5:57 PM

  s/^/This /

squigz today at 5:02 PM

In what context would one re-use a glue like this?

butvacuum today at 4:14 PM

Is there really a use for this(temporary adhesives) outside of Fixturing?

baxuz today at 4:27 PM

This might be very useful for bonding PTFE and aluminium on cookware if it ends up being food safe.

audreysweeney today at 7:20 PM

[dead]

yk today at 4:03 PM

On the left hand side we see a lot very unhappy carbon.