Home > Community > What are suitable solvents to dissolve Teflon, Estane, and Viton?
Upvote

11

Downvote
+ Solvents
+ Chemical engineering
+ Water
+ Chemistry
+ Organic chemistry
Posted by
Martin Brilliant

What are suitable solvents to dissolve Teflon, Estane, and Viton?

Angela Privin  Follow

Mercury, being itself a liquid metal, can dissolve many metals.

The resulting ‘solutions’, being alloys of mercury with those metals, are called amalgams.

More

Upvote

VOTE

Downvote
Cindy Xu  Follow

Teflon (PTFE) is a polymer of fluoroethylene which has a high molecular weight. Effectively it dissolves in itself or something similar. That is, it will dissolve in melted PTFE, or in lower molecular weight polymers of the same monomer in their liquid state. Thus solution is possible in perfluorocarbons, both alkanes and aromatic ones. (i.e. compounds containing only C and F, like PTFE). However this generally requires high temperatures (close to the melting point of the polymer) and high pressures to keep the solvent from boiling. Replacing one of the fluorines with a chlorine gives a polymer of trifluorochloroethylene. A moderate molecular weight of this is a solvent but a very poor one.

Elastane is a trade name for more than one sort of polymer.

Crosslinked materials such as Viton do not dissolve as such but can swell from solvents such as acetone. The uncured material (i.e. not crosslinked) can be dissolved in acetone. This is similar to the difference between raw rubber and vulcanized material.

Note that many commercial grades are not the pure nominal material, and if you simply wish to remove it then something which attacks or dissolves the other component can make it break up.

More

Upvote

VOTE

Downvote