Page 39 - Curriculum Visions Dynamic Book

 The technique of spinning the nylon is used to produce a thread. To do this a piece of the nylon is picked out of the solution using tongs and is carefully lifted clear. Here you can see the difficulty of obtaining a filament with an even diameter. To achieve this the material needs to be lifted from the beaker at a constant rate.
polymer: a compound that is made of long chains by combining molecules (called monomers) as repeating units. (“Poly” means many, “mer” means part).
solvent: the main substance in a solution (e.g. water in salt water).
 The filament begins to form. Here you can see that
the filament can only be produced as long as the two liquids remain. As soon as the batch is used up, the process of picking a filament has to be repeated. Clearly, while the laboratory process shows that it is possible to produce filaments easily, industrial processes have to be found that make a more reliable filament in a continuous process. To do this the threads are extruded, not drawn, as shown on the next page.
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