Polymer Lab 2

Question: What will happen if we mix 12ml of sodium _________ and 3 ml of ethynol alchohal what will happen.

Hypothesis: If we mix these two chemicals than we will have a similar reaction as to our first polymer lab.

Results: We started by mixing the two chemicals and and they didn’t react immediately. However, as soon as we started with stirring with the stirring rod we started to see a solid polymer form. The solid was white which was interesting because there were no white substances that were white that went in. The substance that came out felt wet and seemed to be very crumbly. My group made an initial mistake because we were not gentle enough with the larger clumps of material at the beginning so it started to break and became smaller pieces all around the table we had to salvage the material by getting all of the small pieces together and rolling them in our hands until they started to clump.

Before

After

After we got it to clump we rolled it in our hands until we got a ball similar to part of our first polymer test. The polymer we had was very bouncy when we tried this test. Here I compared both polymers.

Polymer from 1st Lab	Polymer from 2nd Lab
. Stretchy . Wet . Gets crumbly after time .Not quite as bouncy .Breaks when stretched .Easy to put together but not strong	.Not stretchy . Started wet but dried quickly .Very crumbly . Bouncy when put together and hard .Harder to put together but very strong

Both polymers had similar characteristics but were different in the end.

Conclusions: Based off this lab we can tell come to a lot of conclusions. I think my hypothesis proved to be true. Though there may be some obvious differences between the two polymers at the core they are still rather close. They were also both formed out of two liquids even though they ended up solid. Also both were similar because they started out wet but the liquid seeped out over time. This test helped illustrate how polymers work. They cross link and form together to make stronger and more dense materials which you can see by both liquids becoming a stronger solid. This test is interesting because neither of these liquids were as viscous as the glue from our first test. This test probably applies majorly in real life because these chemicals may be used to make plastics and toys in real life. This lab illustrated a lot of proprieties of polymers.