World Webbing formula

[Symbiote-Man]

Yes, and any idea for a projectile that is sticky, perhaps squishy, but solid?

 

[White_widow]

silly string or military sticky foam.

 

[Symbiote-Man]

Thanks.

 

[Ultimate Spider]

Hey W Wids, check this out. I don't know if this will help, but if we can find a way to actually make it, then this might be what we're looking for. And if it doesn't show up, type in "stickiest substance gecko feet" into google.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/322/5899/238.abstract

 

[White_widow]

I've seen that before. Actually, one of the articles was talking about making a web shooter using that stuff. It was described as being a strongly adhesive, nearly invisible fiber that could hold quite a bit of weight. The only problems were that it would be very hard to keep parts of the web apart in the shooter and that is got dirty really easy. It's really cool research though. I'm glad you showed that to me. I always kind of figured that that technology was what was in the fingers of his gloves.

 

[Symbiote-Man]

That reminds me of a climbing thing scientists are making to climb walls, using gravitational pull, close enough to look like it's touching, but not touching. It makes me think of my seeing a starfish yesterday (I went on a vacation) and it had thousands of tiny suction cups on the bottom sticking to the bumpiest rock, because of how small they are, and the material they are made from. That got me thinking, spring loaded tiny tube suction cups for sticking to surfaces. If any of you are interested that, the other gravity related thing, or any sort of climbing gloves, maybe we could start another forum considering these ideas. Anyone up for something like that?

 

[Ultimate Spider]

Can we all have a quick recap of what we need or accomplished as far as the formula? Because the way I see it, in order to make the shooters, we have to know the formula and its components... so... yeah.

 

[White_widow]

Let's see, I think that everyone has a different formula. My particular formula is on the madscientistlair web site, but I'll put it here.

The formula is:

-magnesium oxide (anti-flammatory, light refracting, strength, and expansion)
-graphene (200X stronger than steel. Light, and easy to dissolve in water/acetone)
-cyanoacrylate (super adhesive, quick drying, dries in water, soluable in acetone)
-acetone(near universal light polymer solvent)
-polyvinyl alcohol (tacky adhesive, incredibly strong, water soluable)
-water (universal solvent, expands with oil and surfactant)
-oil (optional) (makes sure it doesn't stick to the hand too badly, causes expansion)
-sodium lauryl sulfate (causes expansion)
-Vinegar and salt (cyanoacrylate catlyst)

 

[spidey44]

White Widow what exactly is going to cause your formula to foam?

 

[Ultimate Spider]

White Dubs,
1) Do you know for sure/ are you pretty sure that those are all needed and those will work?
2) What have you figured out?
3) Have you tested it? Do you have a step by step? Could you have a sort of "here's what we know" list?

And along with these questions comes an idea. More about the shooters, but anyway, if you get all this working and if it's possible, you might want to add the adhesive chambers and valves at the end of the shooter so that the very tip of the strand is sticky as opposed to all of it. This is because if it's as sticky on bad guys as it is on your hands, you might want to watch out for it before you get yourself stuck in web handcuffs.

 

[Ultimate Spider]

Also, just throwing out ideas, I remember watching an episode of Mythbusters where they were testing to see if pottery could work like a record player, and they made grooves in the pottery using glass strands. What they did was they heated glass and they stretched it out so it was a liquid strand, and when it cooled it turned from a liquid to a solid. Like, actual glass reshaping. I don't know if it will help, but like I said, throwing out ideas.

 

[White_widow]

To Spidey44: After researching foams of all kinds, it seems that the only thing that you need for expansion is a surfactant. Soap is all you need for expansion. When in a liquid, and pressure goes through it, it expands. http://studydroid.com/index.php?page=viewPack&packId=121683 This is a little foam quiz. There are foams that can expand to 2000X their original size. I'm hoping with water, magnesium oxide, and sodium lauryl Sulfate, it will expand that much.

To UltimateSpider: Time for a Q and A.

Q: Do you know for sure/ are you pretty sure that those are all needed and those will work?

A: Well, Graphene is the best option we have if we want the webbing to be really strong. It's the only material that by itself is stronger than silk. Theoretically, if we could transfer graphene's micro properties into macro properties, we could make webs with just that, super glue, and Acetone. That in itself though, is harder than actually making spider silk, so we will be doing a polymer blend to make it easier on us. I'm pretty sure that The PVA is a good ingredient, because a .5% increase of Graphene in PVA increased it's strength to half that of steel, and a tad bit more elastic.

Q: What have you figured out?

A:I've been doing research on these materials for quite a while now. I've found out that you can't keep nylon melted. If you wanted to do that, you'd need some form of nylon plasticizer that weakened it significantly. I also found out, that contrary to almost all people on these sites who think, hmmm... let's just mix a bunch of glues and liquify nylon, and it will work. It doesn't. In fact, it is really dangerous. The nylon is so hot that glues begin to emit really bad fumes.

Q: Have you tested it? Do you have a step by step? Could you have a sort of "here's what we know" list?

A: All of that is on my website. I have not tested this new formula yet. Mainly because I don't know where to buy dry ice, and because I don't have a glass container that could withstand the heat of the reaction between that and magnesium. The formula works like this.

1.)Mix acetone and cyanoacrylate.

2.) Mix PVA and water.

3.) Find out whether acetone or water dissolves graphene (apparently graphene in a pure form actually can dissolve in both)

4.)Mix PVA solution and graphene solution. MIX WELL! it won't work otherwise. Preferably, if you can get your hand on a sonicator, then cool. If you can't study dispersion methods. If graphene solution doesn't mix with PVA solution use soap.

5.) Mix PVA/Graphene Solution with Cyanoacrylate solution mix really well.

6.)Pressurize the solution in a cannister.

There you go. Now you may have noticed that I missed some things. Where the heck do magnesium oxide, vinegar, and salt fit it? Graphene has magnesium oxide with it. As for Vinegar and salt, I have no idea how to mix those in. It will probably with the PVA/ Graphene solution though. They are catalysts for CA's chemical reaction.

As for your ideas, they are good. My only complaint is that for the idea about mixing the CA later, it leaves for difficult calculations with rationing. As for the idea about glass, I know what you mean, but in our case, we don't want to use heat for our formula. I do like how you are getting the ball rolling though. We've kind of hit a stand still until I go through college labs with certain details.

 

[Ultimate Spider]

Alright, so now that I know what you're looking for, could you make a thing of what the problems are? And like, what you haven't tested in that step by step?

 

[White_widow]

Ok, I'm not going to lie, I'm not sure what you're saying. But correct me if I'm wrong, but are you asking that I make a list of flaws with the formula and a to do list for testing?

Flaws:
-Graphene is very hard to create in large quantities.
-The cost is rather pricey.
-The adhesion might be lessened due to expansion factors.
-Acetone might not evaporate quickly enough.
-Needs very careful mixing.

Testing procedure:

1.) First, the shooter must be created.
2.) fire off the formula point blank to see how the formula splatters.
3.)fire it off about three feet away.
4.) fire it six feet away at a sturdy beam, and hang off it. (if it holds, then we can determine it's adhesive strength and tensile strength. If it breaks, remake the thing with more graphene.
5.) experiment with different ratios.


Now finally, don't add the soap in the first couple batches. You want to test the strength before the expansion.

 

[Ultimate Spider]

Alright, you nailed it! (Sorry for the misunderstanding, I'm only 16 so I know what you mean.) As for the testing procedure, would it be less time consuming if you made a regular pressurized canist-- um, ahem, remember way back when you gave a tutorial to everyone on how to make a regular silly string shooter? The one where you take the shaving cream cans and you put them in water and squeeze the air out until it makes a vaccuum and then you freeze it? How about you use that as the shooter instead of being dependent on something being developed? Unless, of course, the fluid cannot be one single compound throughout the entire discharge. But if it can be one compound the whole way through, would you be able to test it like that with the homemade DIY shaving shooters?

 

[spidey44]

Have any of you guys seen set photos of the avengers?

 

[Webhead Paul]

When you say pricey how much are you implying it costs White Widow?

 

[JMA610]

How hot is the reaction between dry ice and magnesium? I could use a mason jar, put it in a bowl of ice cold water, then let it all happen. Unless you had another idea. I'm just going off on a limb here. And I think it's pretty cool that we can finally add " then hang from it " to the test procedure. I don't see why this shouldn't work. You have this pretty well thought out.

 

[White_widow]

To Ultimate Spider- For the sake of our experiments, that couldn't hold the pressure that we need to fire it correctly.

to spidey 44- i'm sorry, I haven't seen any of their pictures. I was never really a big avengers fan with the exception of iron man and spiderman.

To webhead paul- It's not that it's bad entirely, but there are alot of components for that formula. The most important two chemicals, cyanoacrylate and graphene, are pretty pricey which is why I recommended making our own. Check my web site for more details. Oh, and welcome to the forums.

To JMA610- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaejFHVjH2w that's alot of fire.

 

[White_widow]

So, like me, most of you are trying to create a formula that relies on your knowledge of the laws of physics to do what you want. I'll tell you how to make your own fluid, even without chemistry knowledge (to a point). This will follow the scientific theory of deduction.

To deduce, create as many theories as you can and disprove them until you find the perfect one for you.

For the webbing fluid, we will look at the properties, as each deduction is built on a purpose. The Properties of web fluid are:

1.) being incredibly strong. The comic theorizes that peter's webbing is as strong as steel.

2.)Being rapidly changing in adhesion. This thing will be so strong that it can hold steel in place, but he can still let go.

3.) It is elastic. This thing will stretch and return to it's original shape.

4.)it is flame ******ant. A batch of this can extinguish fire.

5.)It is shear thinning. The webbing will flow like liquid when under pressure, but it can hold it's shape.

6.) It is white. What does that tell us? Chances are, it's not burned

7.) It's biodegradable.

8.)It's expansive. There is no way to make those tiny cartridges with that much fluid.

Now, we research. I'd start with research in adhesion and tensile strength, and move your way down. Wikipedia is actually good for this. Even though it has lost credit for being easy to edit, it also means that people can explain it their own words making it much easier to understand the basics. For example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensile_strength I went to wikipedia, checked to see if the sources listed were legit, and looked at all of the substances that were stronger than steel by at least 3 times. From that, I gathered metals, plastics, and carbon composites.

Next, start cutting out the impossible. If you want to wear the shooters, cut out metals. It is impossible to wear something that could maintain the heat of metal melting without the use of aerogel or other hard to obtain materials. I can cut out most carbon composites in research because they all require hard to make materials and equipment.

Now that I've made it this far, I have (for me) various plastics and graphene. Keep in mind that I've done this for each property. Now it's time to research how to keep it in a liquid form. This requires reverse deduction. For that, you need the answer to the question, in this case "How to keep is a liquid"

Answer:The fluid is maintained as a liquid.

Theory one: it started out as a liquid and as it hit air it turned into a solid.
Theory two:It is a solid that contains a solvent.
Theory three:It was sheer thinning and could transfer.

Now that you have all possible guesses (there are more but I am getting tired of this message) you can pick out the one that will work for you. In the case of sheer thinning, I can't find an article that explains how that works in detail enough. I also can find a correlation between items that are known to be "Shear thinning". Therefore, I eliminate it. As for the theory that it turns into a solid, that requires a massive knowledge of chemistry that I dount any one of us other than thebatsam has. Therefore I am left with the solvent/plasticizer theory.

Finally, when you've found a way to support a theory after disproving all other alternatives, it's time to work on experimenting to create it. Now I will go through my conclusions on popular theories and how I've disproved them.


Theory One: Nylon and contact cement are the formula.

disproving points: Nylon has an incredibly high melting point, there is almost no solvent for it, and contact cement is too weak unless given alot of time.

answer:NOPE

Theory two: use actual spider silk. Spidersilk is strong, but it is not biodegradable. IT is hard to come by. Spiders are mean when it comes to territory. Finally the glue on spider silk is actually a coating. It hasn't successfully been created.

answer:NOT LIKELY

Theory: Pure Cyanoacylate

problems:It isn't cohesive and it requires a surface to polymerize.

Answer:NO but I did find that it was the only instant glue other than dry adhesion (like that of duct tape.)

So this is how I came up with my current formula.

Use Graphene alone? It's not adhesive and doesn't measure up on a mcro level. Add an adhesive and a plastic. So now it's graphene and cyanoacrylate. Cyanoacrylate bonds two different things and reacts with hydroxide. Now the formula is graphene, cyanoacrylate, and polyvinyl acetate. How do we keep those in liquid form. Acetone dissolves all three of them and water has special effects with all three of them. Add them in. What if the formula doesn't react quick enough? Find a catalyst. Vinegar and water speed up cyanoacrylate so that the formula will work faster. What about expansion? Use a surfactant.

Take the most likely candidates in the research and find a way to blend them together. I knew from the second that I learned about superglue and graphene that I had winners. It was now just a matter of messing with them.

Now accidents will happen, but they can be lucky. For example, when I was researching graphene, I found the method that created that and magnesium oxide. I didn't want to seperate them (as I am lazy) and I found out that magnesium oxide was fire proof, strong, and clear. It fit, and I'm sticking with it (pardon the pun)

That's how I figured out this formula that we have now. Look up properties and then find the best options for those properties, and you can deduce which will work best.

 

[Symbiote-Man]

One of the many weaknesses I have is not being decisive. I have, though, decided once and for all that I am sticking to the flubber prop fluid. No matter what I say, hold me to it. It's easy to make, it looks awesome, and it's inexpensive. Unless... NO! Hold me to it!

 

[White_widow]

why are you going to do the flubber one when water is so easy?

 

[Symbiote-Man]

Water? Not sure what your asking but I'll try to answer...

Water is a toy, I am looking for a prop. Flubber is gooey and probably forms a string, and requires nothing to make it white.

 

[Symbiote-Man]

I am still making my own formula, for my own shooter, I'm not buying things, that's what I'm saying.

 

[White_widow]

Alright, That sounds good. I hope that your formula works.