I ran across a few(YT) different places(thread) suggesting that baking soda acts as an accelerant for cyanoacrylate super glue, and that the resulting matrix is suitable for reef tank application.
Playing with it, you can mix it into the gel, and it solidifies quite quickly. Thin liquid suprerglue is said to be better as it wouldn't need mixing to combine.
I wondered if this could be used for those annoying mushroom corals that wont attach to anything. Most people just put them in deep cups with rubble rock and very low flow until they attach after some days.
You typically can't just glue the coral to anything, because the coral mucus acts as a barrier preventing direct connection between the super glue and the tissue, so I tried treating the coral like a piece of chicken and patting it dry with paper towel and "flouring" it with baking soda. Perhaps the baking soda that was adhered to the moist tissue would allow the cyanoacrylate to form some amount of bond directly to the coral? Aside from it working mechanically, lots of ways it could fail: it might be pretty stressful to the coral, or the coral might just slough off those attached cells and float away again.
I only had gel superglue for this, so I took a frag plug and put a dollop of mixed gel superglue+baking soda, I then put a drop of unmixed superglue gel on top of the dollop, and placed the baking soda "floured" ricordea on the gel dollop and gently pressed the whole thing together with a paper towel and held. After a minute, I unwrapped and carefully lowered into a cup of tank water, and after another 10 minutes in the tank water it seemed decently well attached, so I moved it onto the sandbed of my tank. The section it was on had decent flow, but the ricordea stuck in place.
Here you can see some of the bubbles that formed out of the cyanoacrylate+baking soda mix. The coral stayed well attached in this section even with decent flow for a couple of hours. The next day I checked on it, and bummer. It was gone.
My best guess here is that the mixture was able to actually adhere directly to the coral tissue, but mushroom corals can shed tissue, leave behind parts of their feet without too much trouble and this synthetic attachment didn't make the coral want to stay, so it might have sloughed off this unnatural attachment. So no dice on this method. Oh well!
on the actual reaction of cyanoacrylate and sodium bicarbonate, below is a proposed mechanism which I have no idea if it's correct.
"A monomer, such as methylcyanoacrylate (the substance in super glue), with two electron -withdrawing substituents can be polymerized with very mild nucleophiles such as Br, CN, amines or OH. The monomer polymerizes on contact with many surfaces. Most often it is initialized by the presence of water (the OH ions from water). If you have sodium bicarbonte present, traces of water (from the surface or air) will react and make NaOH. The reaction is the following:
NaHCO3 + H2O -----> NaOH + H2CO3NaOH
is a very good starter of the polymerization reaction. It will make the reaction go very fast."....
I'm curious if this is accurate and what is actually going on. Might be nice to have a little better control over the hardening rate of this glue.
Playing with it, you can mix it into the gel, and it solidifies quite quickly. Thin liquid suprerglue is said to be better as it wouldn't need mixing to combine.
I wondered if this could be used for those annoying mushroom corals that wont attach to anything. Most people just put them in deep cups with rubble rock and very low flow until they attach after some days.
You typically can't just glue the coral to anything, because the coral mucus acts as a barrier preventing direct connection between the super glue and the tissue, so I tried treating the coral like a piece of chicken and patting it dry with paper towel and "flouring" it with baking soda. Perhaps the baking soda that was adhered to the moist tissue would allow the cyanoacrylate to form some amount of bond directly to the coral? Aside from it working mechanically, lots of ways it could fail: it might be pretty stressful to the coral, or the coral might just slough off those attached cells and float away again.
I only had gel superglue for this, so I took a frag plug and put a dollop of mixed gel superglue+baking soda, I then put a drop of unmixed superglue gel on top of the dollop, and placed the baking soda "floured" ricordea on the gel dollop and gently pressed the whole thing together with a paper towel and held. After a minute, I unwrapped and carefully lowered into a cup of tank water, and after another 10 minutes in the tank water it seemed decently well attached, so I moved it onto the sandbed of my tank. The section it was on had decent flow, but the ricordea stuck in place.
Here you can see some of the bubbles that formed out of the cyanoacrylate+baking soda mix. The coral stayed well attached in this section even with decent flow for a couple of hours. The next day I checked on it, and bummer. It was gone.
My best guess here is that the mixture was able to actually adhere directly to the coral tissue, but mushroom corals can shed tissue, leave behind parts of their feet without too much trouble and this synthetic attachment didn't make the coral want to stay, so it might have sloughed off this unnatural attachment. So no dice on this method. Oh well!
on the actual reaction of cyanoacrylate and sodium bicarbonate, below is a proposed mechanism which I have no idea if it's correct.
"A monomer, such as methylcyanoacrylate (the substance in super glue), with two electron -withdrawing substituents can be polymerized with very mild nucleophiles such as Br, CN, amines or OH. The monomer polymerizes on contact with many surfaces. Most often it is initialized by the presence of water (the OH ions from water). If you have sodium bicarbonte present, traces of water (from the surface or air) will react and make NaOH. The reaction is the following:
NaHCO3 + H2O -----> NaOH + H2CO3NaOH
is a very good starter of the polymerization reaction. It will make the reaction go very fast."....
I'm curious if this is accurate and what is actually going on. Might be nice to have a little better control over the hardening rate of this glue.
