• Question: if nothing sticks to teflon what makes the teflon stick to the pan?

    Asked by WaterMeloneee to Alison, Hannah, Jonny, MarthaNari, Paul on 23 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Jonny Brooks-Bartlett

      Jonny Brooks-Bartlett answered on 23 Jun 2015:

      Good question:

      There are two techniques to make Teflon stick to surfaces of items such as pots and pans.

      1) “sintering,” a process similar to melting. Teflon is heated at a very high temperature and pressed firmly onto the surface of the pan. When the material cools down to room temperature, however, chances are it will eventually peel away.

      2) Chemically modifying the side of the Teflon that you want to have “stick” yields better results. By bombarding it with ions in a high vacuum (no air) under an electric field, or “plasma,” we can break away many of the fluorine atoms on the surface that we want to make sticky. We can then substitute other groups, such as oxygen, that stick strongly to surfaces.

    • Photo: Paul Brack

      Paul Brack answered on 24 Jun 2015:

      An interesting fact about Teflon is that it was discovered by accident. In 1938, a man called Roy Plunkett, who was working for the chemical company DuPont in America, was trying to make a new gas to cool down fridges. He found, however, that he was losing some of the gas when he was getting it out of cylinders, so he sawed the top of one of the cylinders. Inside he found Teflon, which had been formed because the iron that made up part of the cylinder actually acted as a catalyst to make Teflon (which is a polymer) from the gas. So many great things in science were discovered by luck!

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