> “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?
gizmo686 1 days ago [-]
Who says this will be a specialized adhesive? If it works as advertised, it could be a super-glue alternative with easy unglueability. That would be an attractive consumer product; and the type of product that could easily end up on someones hands.
danbruc 1 days ago [-]
Superglue is probably two order of magnitude stronger, so I doubt that this will replace cyanoacrylates. And while ethanol or hand sanitizer will not help much with superglue, acetone or nail polish remover will remove it. Then again, acetone will attack more materials then ethanol, so a glue that can be removed with ethanol might still be beneficial.
torginus 15 hours ago [-]
Imo superglue is a shitty glue - it's far too strong and weak at the same time. It's strong in the sense that if you glue two thing together, you're unlikely to get them apart without damaging them.
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.
SV_BubbleTime 1 days ago [-]
Also… Uncure is a popular brand of cyanoacrylate remover. This is already a solved problem it seems.
danbruc 1 days ago [-]
Never heard that name, but according to their safety data sheet [1] it is 95+ % dimethylformamide [2]. Not too different from acetone, with a additional dimethylamin group. Acetone-free nail polish remover usually contains primarily ethyl acetate [3] which is also structurally similar.
Wow, speaking of safety -- I just looked it up to see if Un-Cure superglue/CA debonder would be safe enough to use on hands, or would just cause the chemicals to be broken down and absorbed through the skin at a fast rate too (which I personally wouldn't want), and the initial results I see say that it's ok to use on hands. Wow again.
fingerlocks 16 hours ago [-]
Just like acetone.
psd1 11 hours ago [-]
I sensitised my hands with a single exposure to acetone, and now even isoprop gives me painful flaky fingers for days. I wish I'd worn chemical gloves.
s0rce 21 hours ago [-]
I've always heard of using nitromethane to remove super glue...
refurb 8 hours ago [-]
DMF is quite different than acetone.
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).
SV_BubbleTime 23 hours ago [-]
It must be extremely low vapor pressure compared to acetone. Little smell and not an ultra airtight lid. Lasts forever.
s0rce 21 hours ago [-]
yes, DMF has a much higher boiling point. Its much more polar.
pessimizer 22 hours ago [-]
> Superglue is probably two order of magnitude stronger, so I doubt that this will replace cyanoacrylates.
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.
A 1L bottle of denaturate is cheaper than 200ml bottle of hand sanitizer where I live.
loeg 1 days ago [-]
Hand sanitizer is also contaminated with other crap... presumably that impacts the adhesive if you're attempting to "recycle" it? I agree, what a weird line.
bluGill 1 days ago [-]
Assuming it is even ethanol based in the first place, not all. (more than one alcoholic has ended up in the ER thinking all of them are)
ssl-3 1 days ago [-]
I can think of a few things that relate, as someone who is more in the business of taking random things apart for repair than building them new:
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.
missinglugnut 23 hours ago [-]
I think you misread...the quote is about recycling the adhesive itself with hand sanitizer, not pieces assembled with it. Running an industrial recycling process with unwanted hand sanitizer as a solvent is peak comedy.
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.
ssl-3 23 hours ago [-]
I interpreted "recycle" as ~synonymous with "reuse," which is a valid and common way of using the word.
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?
addaon 1 days ago [-]
One example might be ungluing a lithium pouch cell (usually polyamide film outer surface, which is a pretty low-surface-energy polymer) for home replacement. Electrically-debonded adhesives are a better option here, but not sure what the cost trade-offs look like.
jacinda 19 hours ago [-]
I will refer you to my ER physician friends, who have stories of people attempting to use adhesives of all varieties in the most absurd ways. People will apparently attempt to put anything, anywhere.
Melatonic 19 hours ago [-]
Supergluing your fingers together or other bits of skin is also a well known issue people face when using glue. So it could just be a hedge against people's fears
ortusdux 1 days ago [-]
Stick on nails
NonHyloMorph 22 hours ago [-]
I read it as "specifically for ptfe" too. Where would you glue that? (Heart surgery?)
Melatonic 19 hours ago [-]
One PTFE piece to another PTFE piece ?
kazinator 1 days ago [-]
Maybe a 2026 remake of MacGyver?
colechristensen 1 days ago [-]
Gelled solvents are useful for softening adhesives in certain situations far better than the pure substance
aaron695 21 hours ago [-]
[dead]
oflannabhra 1 days ago [-]
I guess one of my favorite old-school websites will need to get updated, ThisToThat [0].
maybe, but where is the whimsy or delight in that?
BenjiWiebe 1 days ago [-]
Not a lot of whimsy and delight in having your glue joint fail because the delightful & whimsical website gave bad advice.
SV_BubbleTime 1 days ago [-]
Dude, people in 2026 still think duct tape is a “great product”.
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!!
psd1 11 hours ago [-]
People in 2026 have never seen duct tape unless they work in hvac. Duck tape, on the other hand, is in every household. On which topic, i think you're missing the point: duck tape is never the best solution, but it's good enough in a pinch for an incredible range of applications, and it has long shelf life. Think of it as a hacker tool.
markdown 22 hours ago [-]
Hey what do you use in place of duct tape?
conorcleary 21 hours ago [-]
TuckTape
croemer 17 hours ago [-]
It's been a while since I've seen such an ad-plagued site.
DivingForGold 22 hours ago [-]
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.
Melatonic 19 hours ago [-]
I saw this and was immediately excited for use with UHMWPE. Too bad it doesn't work on polyethylenes
tape_measure 17 hours ago [-]
It's like soap for fluorine compounds.
culi 1 days ago [-]
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
pastage 1 days ago [-]
delete
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.
cogman10 1 days ago [-]
PFAS (which is what makes nonstick nonstick) have tentative links to several cancers [1]
It's worth noting that all "forever chemicals" have major health concerns. PFAS, as a class, is the one most studied. They have been explicitly banned in many countries (e.g. France and Sweden) and even some US states (Maine, Minnesota, etc).
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.
quickthrowman 1 days ago [-]
PTFE is perfectly safe as long as you don’t get it too hot. So, not the best material for non-stick pans.
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.
throwway120385 24 hours ago [-]
You can use pipe dope instead of PTFE if you want. It's just more expensive.
lazide 22 hours ago [-]
Most pipe dope is made with PTFE now.
culi 1 days ago [-]
Non-stick pans are fine if they are never heated above 500°F (260°C) and never scratched. In general, you probably shouldn't regularly use a nonstick pan for longer than 2 years.
If it is scratched or heated above what it says on the label, then yes it is absolutely toxic.
galangalalgol 1 days ago [-]
Why is scratched a problem? They use the same stuff in medical implants. It is chemically inert if you don't overheat it right?
culi 20 hours ago [-]
A single scratch on a pan is enough to release thousands to millions of PTFE particles and microplastic particles. Scratched pans also significantly lowers the PFAS thermal stability which means even low temperatures can be overheating
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
PakG1 23 hours ago [-]
Isn't that the problem? From what I am googling right now, the maximum tempreature of my stove is absolutely above the threshold where it stops being chemically inert. If we were talking about some usage that didn't involve heating, then I guess maybe I'd hear out a usage for it, but even then, not sure the benefits are worth having something that can't degrade and yet can potentially get ingested by my body.
ssl-3 24 hours ago [-]
PTFE is very inert, but that doesn't mean that I want to eat more of it than I have to. And as a practical matter: Once it begins flaking off, more tends to follow. I don't know if that's because of oxidation of the aluminum, or what, but it sure seems to behave that way.
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.)
galangalalgol 9 hours ago [-]
We got one of the greenpans for eggs after the last ptfe one chipped. It is ceramic glass coating of some sort. About halfway between ptfe and mirror stainless for sticking. Better than that if you keep the temp low. Kinda pricey though.
ssl-3 4 hours ago [-]
I've looked at those and they do seem nice.
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.
dotancohen 23 hours ago [-]
I'd love to know more. I'm sure that I've scratched and overheated every pan I own.
qmr 1 days ago [-]
... or just avoid the risk entirely.
culi 20 hours ago [-]
Old school teflon is inert at low temperatures but when you scratch it, it's thermal stability is drastically lowered. Even low temperatures can be dangerous.
Also most pans nowadays have phased that out and use PFOA or GenX which are absolutely not inert.
freediddy 1 days ago [-]
I'm thankful they are researching the environmental impact of this. The last thing we need is another PFAS debacle decades later.
trollbridge 1 days ago [-]
No kidding. Fluoro-anything needs to be checked out for impact on the ozone layer, problems that happens when it burns, and problems that happens when it flakes off and gets ingested by people.
mint5 1 days ago [-]
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 23 hours ago [-]
Among cyanoacrylates, Permabond 105 does a pretty good job bonding teflon, if you use their primer.
ble 1 days ago [-]
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 ;)
bombela 1 days ago [-]
For anybody not getting the reference, standard glue gun glue is obviously applied freshly melted and hot, and it is dissolved/debonded cleanly with isopropyl alcohol.
kazinator 1 days ago [-]
But does not stick to "nonstick" surfaces, which the researchers claim this does.
ssl-3 1 days ago [-]
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.
kazinator 1 days ago [-]
I have an electric guitar which has an uncovered electronic cavity in the back, where the volume pot is mounted, and all wiring passing through it. I have a DPDT sliding switch there which is just held by hot glue to the side of the cavity, and recessed in a bit so that it isn't accidentally moved. It's been that way for years. From time to time it used to come off spontaneously, requiring a re-gluing, but I learned to do it better.
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.
bluGill 1 days ago [-]
There are many different hot glues, not all have that property.
ssl-3 1 days ago [-]
TIL.
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.
bluGill 1 days ago [-]
Not all hot glue comes in stick form for use in a glue gun. When I hear hot glue I first think of hide glue for example.
1 days ago [-]
gertop 1 days ago [-]
The ones that don't have the property are expensive specialized/stronger glue sticks. If you stick to dollar general you don't have to think about it.
pavel_lishin 1 days ago [-]
My mind immediately jumped to The Mote In God's Eye.
bertjk 1 days ago [-]
At the risk of asking a really dumb question: Does this only work on PTFE or other flourine-compound surfaces?
coldbrewed 1 days ago [-]
IANA chemist but my guess is that it's of particular interest because PTFE surfaces are especially non-stick, and non-PTFE surfaces have good options that require less exotic chemistry.
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?
tengbretson 1 days ago [-]
I really want to see this tested on HDPE. A simple, reliable adhesive for polyethylene could be a game changer.
eszed 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
nosmokewhereiam 22 hours ago [-]
I thought of the seal defeat of using acetone on envelopes...to solve the challenge ofc from Defcon
oasisbob 1 days ago [-]
Isn't high-ductility associated with creep, especially under static loads? That would seem to be a downside of an adhesive like this.
squigz 1 days ago [-]
In what context would one re-use a glue like this?
DannyBee 1 days ago [-]
I have a weird use case, but this is actually wildly useful to me.
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.
bombela 1 days ago [-]
I would 3D print (FDM) standoffs in PE with integrated pockets to insert magnets. You can even insert the magnets during the print if you fancy. Though my preference goes to a slide in pocket.
PE sticks to itself and not much else. Packing tape is PE and adhesive. Apply PE tape to the printer bed before printing.
DannyBee 1 days ago [-]
Yeah I have been playing with 3d printing nylon and pps versions because pure pe filament are harder to find. They also often have really really poor layer adhesion and crazy levels of warping.
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.
tape_measure 17 hours ago [-]
Acetone would almost certainly dissolve this stuff also.
1 days ago [-]
teddyh 1 days ago [-]
s/^/This /
baxuz 1 days ago [-]
This might be very useful for bonding PTFE and aluminium on cookware if it ends up being food safe.
dcrazy 1 days ago [-]
Any reason to think this flower of fluorines (seriously, that thing looks INTENSE) would be any more environmentally safe than PFOA?
forgetfreeman 1 days ago [-]
I'd be interested to see the Things I Won't Work With author's take on the synthesis given his usual reaction to fluorine chemistry
nick__m 22 hours ago [-]
I made the same error as you, before realizing that in this molecule the fluorine is bounded to a carbon not an oxygen. Fluorine once bounded to a carbon won't move from there unless it receive a lot's of energy. A fluorine bounded to an oxygen really wants to be elsewhere and it's ready to pay a lot's of energy to make it happen! So the scary looking part of that chemical is incredibly stable and this is what make this substance potentially dangerous.
pumnikol 23 hours ago [-]
I really don't know about food safe. Or safe for any end consumer, really.
They absolutely need to do some severe toxicity testing. Because this funny new glue is an organic phosphate which in itself already raises some serious questions.
On top of that, the ring also contains two perfluoropinacol moieties which could be released e.g. on heating or through interaction with acids or something else. This is a highly volatile molecule and "fatal in contact with skin," i.e. of the highest toxicity class.
That ain't no good.
GuB-42 1 days ago [-]
If you don't cook with ethanol that is...
yk 1 days ago [-]
On the left hand side we see a lot very unhappy carbon.
1 days ago [-]
audreysweeney 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
jyounker 24 hours ago [-]
That is a deeply scary looking compound.
bilsbie 1 days ago [-]
Could this be used for hanging things from walls without damaging them?
butvacuum 1 days ago [-]
Is there really a use for this(temporary adhesives) outside of Fixturing?
jesperwe 1 days ago [-]
The marine industry would love a (non water soluble) glue that achieves structural strength on PTFE and POM.
TeMPOraL 1 days ago [-]
Are you asking if there's use for temporarily sticking stuff to other stuff?
Yes, plenty. Especially if it sticks well while needed, and then can be non-destructively undone when no longer needed.
bluGill 1 days ago [-]
That is generally what fixturing implies. A temporary bond that you use while making a part, and then remove when the part is complete.
lotu 1 days ago [-]
I think it could also be used outside of making a part. For example you want to setup sensor on a surface but it's important not to damage the surface, like the outside of a boat. This would be excellent for that.
Rendered at 21:21:08 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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?
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.
[1] https://bsi-inc.com/sds_pdf/sds_un_cure.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylformamide
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethyl_acetate
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.
https://www.quirkyscience.com/how-to-glue-teflon/
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?
[0] - https://www.thistothat.com
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!!
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.
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.
[1] https://dceg.cancer.gov/research/what-we-study/pfas
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.
If it is scratched or heated above what it says on the label, then yes it is absolutely toxic.
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
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.
Also most pans nowadays have phased that out and use PFOA or GenX which are absolutely not inert.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, plenty. Especially if it sticks well while needed, and then can be non-destructively undone when no longer needed.