What makes Silly Putty soft?

What makes Silly Putty soft?

Add a few squirts of hand soap to your putty to make it very soft. Choose a scented or in scented hand soap to use as a thinning agent for your putty. Add a blueberry-sized amount to your putty, then massage the soap in with your hands. Keep folding and kneading the putty until it reaches a softer consistency.

Can Silly Putty be compressed?

Of course, silly putty can be rolled up into another cylinder and squashed endlessly just for fun. That�s because the weak hydrogen bonds and untangled molecules can be reassembled on a long time scale, provided a force is applied to allow the putty to flow back to where it was before it was squashed.

How does the Silly Putty behave is it a solid or liquid?

That’s because its main ingredient is polydimethylsiloxane, a material with viscoelastic properties. In other words, over long flow times or at high temperatures, Silly Putty behaves like a highly viscous fluid. But over short flow times or at low temperatures, it behaves like an elastic solid.

How does Silly Putty work?

Silly Putty is made of polymers, or long chains of molecules, that are cross-linked by weak hydrogen bonds. These bonds make the Silly Putty easy to roll into a ball and stick to itself. When the Silly Putty is stretched carefully, the hydrogen bonds break apart slowly and allow the putty to hold together.

What was silly putty originally used for?

Silly Putty was one of the things taken into lunar orbit in 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission. They principally used it to secure tools in place so they wouldn’t float away. Originally you could use Silly Putty to copy text from comics and newspapers and the like.

What happens when you stretch Silly Putty?

They flow like a liquid or can be stretched slowly. This is because the molecular chains are loosely arranged and can slide past each other. If pulled quickly, the molecular chains break away from each other instead of sliding. The zig-zag shape of the molecules allows the putty and the flubber to bounce like a spring.

Is Silly Putty the same as Plasticine?

All three materials seem to behave in a qualitatively similar manner, but Plasticine is not elastic whereas Silly Putty and tennis strings are highly elastic when stretched or compressed rapidly. Small Plasticine and Silly Putty cylinders were squashed along their axis to measure the force F versus the compression x.

What was Silly Putty originally used for?

Why is Silly Putty in an egg?

SILLY PUTTY WAS PACKED IN PLASTIC EGGS BECAUSE IT WAS EASTER. Hodgson decided to re-name the goo “Silly Putty” and sell it on his own. But it wasn’t just whimsy that drove Hodgson to package Silly Putty in plastic eggs—it was also timing.

Why does Silly Putty come in an egg?

How is the viscosity of Silly Putty determined?

Silly Putty is non-Newtonian fluid: Its viscosity depends on both temperature and on the force applied to it. The classic example of such a fluid is corn starch solution. When you mix water with corn starch, you get a material that feels like a thick fluid when it’s stirred slowly. Tap on it, though, and it feels like a dense solid.

Where did the idea of Silly Putty come from?

Ah, the joy of cracking open that red egg and squeezing a little Silly Putty. See more pictures of classic toys . They say necessity is the mother of invention, and for Silly Putty, the strange material that ships in an egg and behaves sometimes like a liquid and other times like a solid, necessity came in the form of Imperial Japan.

How does silly putty work in slow motion?

You could form it into shapes, like Play-Doh, but unlike its modeling-compound cousin, which held a pose indefinitely, Silly Putty flowed in slow motion. Stick it on the side of a filing cabinet, for example, and it would run down the side slowly, taking weeks — even months — to respond to gravity ‘s downward pull.

What was Hodgson’s description of Silly Putty?

In early marketing efforts, Hodgson summed up Silly Putty’s enigmatic properties by describing the material as a “solid liquid” [source: Crayola ]. Interestingly, he didn’t think these qualities would attract kids.