It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superglue!

Courtesy of Ifoundouttoday.com

Things break, that’s just how the world works. While materials like wood or metal can be mended with rivets, nails, or screws, other materials are not repaired so easily. Enter: superglue. When things like mugs shatter, pots break, plastic pieces snap, superglue is here to save the day! If you’ve ever accidently got some on your fingers and stuck them together, you know just how powerful this adhesive can be. But what makes this substance so sticky, and how can such small amounts of it be so strong?

Superglue isn’t your everyday Elmer’s. Firstly, many traditional glues, such as Elmer’s, work through what is known as solvent evaporation. In this process, a polymer (a long repeating chain of chemical units known as monomers) such as polyvinylacetate, is first suspended in a water solution (this solution is what you purchase in the store). When the solution is applied to a material and exposed to air, the water from the solution begins to evaporate. Eventually, all of the water evaporates, leaving behind a layer of flexible polymer. Superglue, however, goes through a process known as curing, in which a chemical reaction actually takes place!

The main component in superglue is a chemical called cyanoacrylate. When exposed to air, water droplets in the air initiate a process known as anionic polymerization.  First, a water droplet attacks the carbon-carbon double bond in cyanoacrylate, pushing a pair of electrons onto one of the carbons. Now, this carbon has more electrons than it needs, and therefore has a negative charge (electrons have a negative charge), and is referred to as an anion. To get rid of this negative charge, this carbon then attacks a nearby molecule of cyanoacrylate, causing a new negative charge to form. This process continues until all of the molecules of methyl cyanoacrylate have reacted, creating a network of long chains of polycyanoacrylate. It is this multitude of bonds that gives superglue its super strength!

Ten Facts about Super Glue: http://www.supergluecorp.com/blog/2010/05/17/10-fun-facts-about-super-glue/

References:

• chm233.asu.edu/notes/halides/
• http://home.howstuffworks.com/question695.htm
• http://books.google.com/books?id=OZ6CbJlsJM8C&pg=PA1131&lpg=PA1131&dq=chemistry+of+superglue&source=bl&ots=Qp4NViO9bD&sig=OdYbttoZuBTnBY9t06CKfsmpItI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=-ob8UJboAuGT0QGAioCgBg&ved=0CE8Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=chemistry%20of%20superglue&f=true