1.7 KiB
1.7 KiB
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.