New Glue Bonds to Nonstick Surfaces and Wipes Clean with Ethanol
We developed a small-molecule adhesive called Cyclic FP-fmoc that bonds strongly to nonstick surfaces like PTFE yet removes completely with a simple ethanol wash. This breakthrough combines high strength and ductility, allowing the glue to lift heavy weights while remaining fully reusable without losing performance. Unlike traditional polymers, our approach enables easy recycling of both the adhesive and the bonded objects.
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.
- murderfs
> “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
I guess one of my favorite old-school websites will need to get updated, ThisToThat [0].
- DivingForGold
Budding armchair polymer chemists: The article specifically states this adhesive works by way of flourine-flourine bonds (found in PFAS and flourocarbon materials).
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.
- culi
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
- freediddy
I'm thankful they are researching the environmental impact of this. The last thing we need is another PFAS debacle decades later.
- mint5
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.
- analog31
Among cyanoacrylates, Permabond 105 does a pretty good job bonding teflon, if you use their primer.
- ble
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 ;)