Cross-linking Elmer's Glue with Sodium Borate

Cross-linking Elmer’s Glue with Sodium Borate

What will happen when the properties of polymer are changed?

If the different properties are added to a polymer, then the links will change, because more elements are being added to the polymer.

First, get safety goggles. Then, get 100 mL of water and add a tablespoon of borax to the water. Stir this mixture until the borax is almost dissolved. In a seperate beaker, get 25 mL of glue and add 5 mL of water. Stir this mixture. Then, add 40 mL of the borax mixture into the glue mixture. Stir until the glue and borax mixture looks like a ball of slime. If there is any extra water, dump it out. When done with the experiment, clean up the table.

After the water was added to the glue, the glue became very liquidy. When the borax was added to the glue mixture, it became harder. When stretched slowly, the slime stretches for a little bit and then breaks. When it is stretched slowly, the slime immediately breaks.

Slime is visco-elastic because it is very bouncy. A physical properties that changed was the consistency of the slime. The effect to adding more borax would be a very liquidy ball of slime that wouldn’t stay together very well. Water affects the elasticity because it breaks down the elements in the glue.

In the end, I accepted my hypothesis. I stated that when a polymer was added to a different property, the links would change, and in this experiment, it did just that. One thing that we did wrong, that could have affected our experiment was that we didn’t stir the glue mixture and borax mixture enough, but we dumped out the extra borax mixture, because we thought it was finished. When we found out we hadn’t stirred it enough, we just put plain water in the glue mixture, instead of putting the borax mixture in there. With the super-absorbent polymer balls that were shown before doing this experiment, it was a similar way of showing how polymers cross-link. It was similar, becuase with the super-absorbent polymer balls, the polymer balls had grown to the state at which they would stay at. With this experiment, when the two mixtures were combined, they ended up staying in one state.