Magical Realism ? (with apologies to García Márquez)

Looks frosty on the roll, invisible on the job  that is how 3M company  advertises its product, the Magic Tape.  3M  came up with  transparent cellophane sealing tapes in the thirties. If that was a huge success, then   the Magic tape introduced in the  early sixties was indeed a  roaring success.  The convenience of  writing  over the Magic Tape  with a pen or pencil  or marker  increased  its popularity immensely. Today   MT has become  an integral part of every day life for everybody  - children, adults ,artists, executives,  housewives ……… .  3M soon designed  a convenient tape  dispenser too. Besides the magic tape  3M has  a whole series of  tapes in its Scotch portfolio, to suit any need/emergency. Particularly impressive are the colored,  patterned  and glitter  tapes.  The post-it  is also currently available in tape form.  All  these  are tapes which stick onto a surface when you apply a little  pressure( thumb pressure will do) and hence are also called  Pressure SensitiveTapes(PSTs).

       

But try peeling off the  tape,(exclude the post-it ) and you get a tutorial on magical realism. The tape pulls off a layer of the  surface it  is attached to.   Amazingly this worked like magic and   fetched  Andrei Geim and Kostya Novoselov   Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010  for the discovery of graphene.   In fact the Nobel committee made a mention of the playfulness of the scientists and their   process:  Playfulness is one of their hallmarks, one always learns something in the process and, who knows, you may even hit the jackpot. Like now when they, with graphene, write themselves into the annals of science. The  tape dispenser used by Geim and Novoselov   is  currently an exhibit  in the Nobel Museum, Stockholm.

But  reality remains.  Such tapes are used as short term damage control agents  to hold together  heritage materials or artworks.  By the time  authorities get down to  extensive restoration work, the  band-aids are often  discolored and/ or are  irretrievably  stuck to the surface.  Confronted with this  challenge, Professor Baglioni of the department of Chemistry, University of Florence   came up with a unique solution.    He and his team  “addressed the  issue from a physicochemical perspective”.

 

Professor Baglioni and his team  found that the   most popular PSTs used for damage control of artworks are    FilmoplatP (FPP), MagicTape (MT) and ordinary tape(OT).  In all the three  the adhesive is  acrylic based,  while the backing (tape material)  was cellulose for FPP,  cellulose acetate for MT  and  polypropylene for OT.   The team  had to design a peeling process restricted to the surface area of the tape  so that surrounding areas remained unaffected.  They solubilized a mixture of assorted organic solvents  in  water  using a detergent called  sodium dodecyl sulfate . The detergent ensured that the organic solvent mixture remained as nanosized droplet in the aqueous medium. Hydrogels, which are polymeric scaffolds with high affinity for water,  when immersed  in this medium,  absorbed  the same.    The swollen hydrogel was cut into strips of  required size and    applied over  the tapes. The solvents  slowly penetrated the backing  and in less than  half an hour  the tape could be easily pealed off.  

References

1. Scotch Products for consumers
2. Nobel Prize for Physics 2010
3. Restoration of paper artworks with microemulsions confined in hydrogels for safe and efficient removal of adhesive tapes.