You are eating a hot dog or digging into a carton of your favorite ice cream. You don’t even think there could be a piece of plastic or metal or just small particles of these materials in there- broken or worn off from the machinery and tools used to get your favorite foods to your … Read more
Polyoxymethylene (POM) is a thermoplastic materialalso known as acetal. It is a molecule containing the functional group of carbon bonded to two –OR groups. POM was first discovered by German chemist Hermann Staudinger who won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He had studied it in the 1920s but found it to be thermally unstable. DuPont … Read more
Emo Rubik, a professor at the University of Budapest in Hungary, designed the now famous Rubik’s Cube in the mid-1970’s. It is made up of 26 smaller cubes and has six faces, each made up of nine different colors: red, yellow, blue, white, green and orange. His intention in designing it was to demonstrate to … Read more
So you have a plastic part and you need to know what it is made of but you have no idea what plastic it is. This can be a challenging task. Many plastics look and feel alike but we will take a closer look here at some of the ways using a burn test. Please … Read more
Originally, plastic resins were made from vegetable matter including cellulose from cotton, furfural from oat hulls, oils from seeds and various starch derivatives. Bakelite (phenol formaldehyde resin), one of the first plastics made from synthetic components, was developed by Belgian born chemist Leo Backeland in New York in 1907. Bakelite is made through an elimination … Read more
