Wilker disclosed his adhesives to the Purdue Innovates Office of Technology Commercialization, which has applied for a patent to protect the intellectual property. Their team's innovations may pave the way to a more sustainable system for holding the world together. Further research will refine the system and work to maximize societal and environmental impacts in areas ranging from medical innovations to industrial materials to packaging. In many cases, their new adhesives held up well, sometimes performing similarly to, or even better than, traditional toxic adhesives such as a superglue and an epoxy. To test the adhesive's performance, the scientists bonded together objects - wood, plastics or metals - and then used an instrument for breaking the bonds and measuring forces. Basically, you can mix and heat the components." Other bio-based compounds can also be used with epoxidized soy oil, generating an entire family of new sustainable adhesives. A bonus is that the adhesive is easy to make. "All of the components are bio-based, safe and already available at train car scales. Epoxies are generally considered to be the highest performance class of adhesives. "If you combine these components under the right conditions, adhesives can be made that are as strong as epoxies," Wilker said. Those three ingredients added up to an adhesive that is inexpensive, effective, scalable, practical to produce and completely sustainable. Tannic acid is a component of tannins, common in trees, red wine and black tea. Then they added tannic acid, to provide an aspect of the chemistry that mussels use for attaching themselves to rocks and each other. Wilker and his team added the epoxidized soy oil to malic acid, a compound most known for giving apples their tart flavor. Since each experiment uses just a little epoxidized soy oil, the level in their drum has dropped only a few inches after several years of testing. For their work, the smallest container that they could purchase was a 55-gallon drum of the substance. Epoxidized soy oil is already produced globally on a massive scale. Further design constraints that we grapple with, in order to have impact, are costs needing to be low and having all starting compounds available at large scales."Īfter a series of experiments on a range of different biologically sourced and sustainable ingredients, the team settled on epoxidized soy oil for a main component. Then we would like to bond them strongly when needed and also be able to take the substrates apart when wanted. Strengths should be as high as current products. Ideally, new adhesives will be bio-based and nontoxic. "Given all of the problems generated by current glues, we feel an obligation to create something better. "By studying how nature makes adhesives, we are learning how to design new technologies for our future society," Wilker said. Any new adhesive must work at least as well as traditional products, which is why Wilker keeps that drawer around: to test them, side by side, against innovative substances. However, people and companies are accustomed to using traditional adhesives they're strong, easy to produce and relatively inexpensive. These substances are harmful both to the environment and to human health. ![]() Newly built houses are off-gassing formaldehyde, exposing residents to this carcinogen. One example is the common building material plywood, which is formed of wood pieces held together with formaldehyde-based adhesives. "Those volatile petrochemicals in these glues can be toxic, which is a further problem with current technologies," Wilker said. He has a drawer of those commercial glues in his lab, which give off a strong and familiar smell. Wilker and his lab have spent years studying the science of sticky substances, analyzing marine animals that adhere, like mussels and oysters, and trying to create better, sustainable, affordable adhesives that work as well as any glue from the hardware store. Discarded products will sit in landfills for centuries and, sometimes, contribute to ocean microplastics." Consequently, we cannot recycle many of the materials that we put into our recycling bins. The bonded materials in our products stay stuck together. "Almost all glues are petroleum-based and do not degrade. "Our current adhesives create all sorts of environmental problems," Wilker said. The team's findings were released in a paper in Nature. A team of chemists at Purdue University led by Jonathan Wilker, professor of chemistry in the College of Science and of materials engineering, aims to change that with a new, completely sustainable adhesive system. The trouble with all those adhesives is that they are not sustainable.
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