Friday, December 04, 2020
Researchers Create Super-Strong Glue That Releases by Dissolving Into Thin Air
gizmodo.com: Products designed with temporary adhesives that don’t hold forever—such as sticky notes, painter’s tape, and bandages—still require some level of force to be removed, meaning there’s always the risk of damaging paint on a wall or painfully losing some body hair. But what if glue simply vanished into thin air when it was no longer needed? It’s an idea that researchers at Dartmouth College have made a reality.
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The chemistry glossed over in this article gave me flashbacks to high school chemistry. I guess I had no thought about how that the removal of any adhesive is putting a force of sorts on the surface you’re sticking too or removing something from This article title was very misleading – I thought that this article was going to show me a product that has dissolving adhesive, but alas it just tells me that perhaps one day there will be a product that might exist and dissolves in thin air. I did immediately question how said adhesive would stay stuck if it dissolved in thin air, and I guess the catch is that it only dissolves if heated in a vacuum. This feels less like a temporary adhesive and more like a permanent installation tool. I’d be interested to see a strong temporary adhesive that dissolves in an alcohol or oil based solution.
This is a very well thought out product concept, you have no idea how many times i've ripped a Bandaid off my leg and a ball of leg hair came with it, or when i've used painters tape on a drafting project or any paper and it happened to rip some of the paper off, so this was a problem that has many applicable solutions. After reading the article, I learned a lot about how long-term and short term adhesives work, where polymers create strong or weak intermolecular bonds. The article was a little bit of a throwback to my high school chemistry class, where I learned that sublimation is the process where a solid turns to a gas with out having to be liquid. The researchers at Dartmouth University happened to use this process of sublimation to create an adhesive which is known as a molecular solid, where solid molecules stack on top of each other. I was blown away by the fact that the adhesive can support up to 500 pounds, thats just absolutely crazy
Polymer science and engineering is such a fascinating field that we still don't really know a whole lot about. Over the past few decades, it has served as the foundation for modern composites and has revolutionized materials engineering. Polymer chains, as described in this article, are incredible, exhibiting very high strengths with unique physical properties. Granted, in order to reap the benefits of polymer chains you have to pull some crazy science off (like sucking the air out of the room), but we are still one step closer to actually implementing this in day-to-day adhesives. In our industry, I feel like we tend to stray away from adhesives purely because of their destructive properties. Even with a small vacuum chamber, though, I feel like this could save a lot of hand props that need slight modifications. Once the run is over, just pop it into the chamber and crank up the heat, and (as long as the prop doesn't melt) you've salvaged the pieces! In a scenery world, if this could eventually serve as a substitute wood-glue, that may bode well for saving wood from flats or plywood from planforms.
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