Yesterday we made Nylon. It was pretty cool. You have three liquid materials in a beaker which do not mix, instead they form two separate layers with a film in the middle. Then with a hook you simply grab the filmy middle bit and pull up. The result is a white strand of Nylon. The procedure is really cool. This photos don’t do it justice as it was hard to operate my camera one handed.
The whole experiment is done at room temperature, and it was really cool watching the strand of Nylon form from the liquid. Apparently in a previous year a student managed to make an unbroken 9.6 meter strand. I did get a pretty long strand at one point, but I couldn’t seem to keep it from tangling up and so it was too difficult to measure. But it was still probably the most visually stunning lab I’ve done all year.
Janie's Place 