Hands-On Thermoplastic

Not too HOT to handle!

Try your hand at shaping PCL!

• More flexible than polymer clay.
• More useful than Silly Putty.
• Easier than a 3D printer.

How does it work?

• With just a little warmth, this material becomes putty in your hands, to shape as you wish.
• Let it cool & it becomes tough & rigid, holding its shape.
• Warm it back up to try again!

What is it?

A polymer

• Its generic name is poly(caprolactone), but we just call it PCL for short.
• It is made of long chains of small molecules all hooked together.
  • We call this type of material a polymer.
• Manufactured polymers are often just called plastics.

Thermoplastics

• Plastics that can be shaped when warm but which become less flexible when cool are called thermoplastics.
• PCL is sold under a number of different trade names.
• PCL is a close relative to thermoplastics used in a very common type of 3D printer (fused-deposition modelling).

Where do we find other polymers?

3D Printing

• There is one big difference between PCL and most 3D printing plastics: The working temperature for those plastics (like ABS and PLA) are too hot to handle--you could easily get burned if you tried to shape them by hand!
• PCL is a great way to get a real feel for how these printers work.

In essence you become the 3D printer with PCL!

• ABS = acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene copolymer
• PLA = poly(lactic acid)

Natural polymers

Living things contain a lot of polymers too:

• Proteins
• DNA
• carbohydrates

are all naturally occurying types of polymers.