Another way to extend life is to change the color; adding carbon black prolonges the life of rubber substantially (Protection from light) and by adding antioxidants. The background of embrittlement of polybutadiene (polyisoprene) based rubbers is crosslinking by radical chain reactions with oxygen.

Polymers like rubber shrink on heating as their molecular chains curl up, and water shrinks when warmed from its freezing point to around 4°C. After that, though, it behaves normally, and expands on warming. In contrast, so-called negative thermal expansion (NTE) materials never behave themselves.

now heating rubber makes atoms faster, make them hit stronger which makes chains and so rubber shorter. By heating the rubber up, we increase the entropy – the amount of disorder among its molecules – and we make it pull itself tighter together. That’s why a rubber band contracts when you heat it up.

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Some rubber bands, like the ones from the office store, seem to degrade really fast. Others seem to last a long time, almost indestructible.

The technical answer is, no, rubber cannot freeze but it does get hard and brittle. As rubber polymers cannot form crystalline structures, they do not freeze by definition. However, the physical property changes of rubber in low temperatures may affect the performance of your product.

Rubber bands become brittle with age due not so much because of oxidation but rather due to evaporation of volatiles in the rubber/plastic material. These volatiles are parts of the plastic/rubber material that keep them soft and flexible, and the loss of them cause them to become stiff and break.

QUESTION: What causes rubber bands to dry out and lose their elasticity? ANSWER: Rubber is a polymer; polymers are long chains of molecules connected together, much like long pieces of spaghetti. Ultraviolet light affects those chains and breaks them down, causing the rubber to dry, crack and crumble.

Rubber is not ductile. Ductility is the ability of a material to undergo permanent deformation through elongation or bending without fracturing. However, rubber has a ‘shelf life’ of between 3 and 5 years depending on how it is stored. Rubber becomes brittle as it ages.

Now just as the environment can cause rubber to crack, flake and decay — “dry rot” — it can also cause the rubber to revert back to its original state. We call that reversion, and it happens when the stronger polymer crosslinks get snipped and the molecules revert back into their original small chains.

Despite the fact that pure hydrocarbon rubbers intrinsically absorb very little water (less than 1 part in 1000), most rubber vulcanizates will, in time, absorb several per cent.

Answer Expert Verified In this particular activity, the experiment aims to give an understanding how Earth’s plates move, and in this activity, the box that is attached to the rubber band suddenly slips forward after the rubber bands were stretched.

Stick slip refers to the fast movement that occurs between two sides of a fault when the two sides of the fault become unstuck. The rock becomes distorted, or bent, but holds its position until the earthquake occurs.

Answer: If the bent object will spring back to it’s original shape when you let go of it, then the stored energy is known as elastic .

Movement along fault changes the topography of its surroundings. A normal fault would create rift valleys and mid-oceanic ridge. A reverse fault can create a chain of volcanoes, powerful earthquakes, Island arcs, mountain range, large mountain belts. Strike-slip fault would create valley or undersea canyon.

It will be like drilling into a volcano. Removing the oil from the Santa Barbara coastline will trigger larger earthquakes and tsunamis. If we drill into this fault zone and remove the oil from this gigantic 3000 mile fault zone crossing the Pacific Ocean, we will make two changes that are not at all good.

The majority of deep crustal earthquakes occur along the rift margins in regions that have cooler, thicker crust. We believe the deep crustal earthquakes represent either the relative motion of rift zones with respect to adjacent stable regions or the propagation of rifting into stable regions.

normal fault – a dip-slip fault in which the block above the fault has moved downward relative to the block below. This type of faulting occurs in response to extension and is often observed in the Western United States Basin and Range Province and along oceanic ridge systems.

There are three kinds of faults: strike-slip, normal and thrust (reverse) faults, said Nicholas van der Elst, a seismologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.

There are four types of faulting — normal, reverse, strike-slip, and oblique. A normal fault is one in which the rocks above the fault plane, or hanging wall, move down relative to the rocks below the fault plane, or footwall.

There are two types of inclined dip slip faults. In Normal faults the hanging wall in moving downward relatively to the footwall. Normal faults accommodate extensional deformation. In reverse faults, the hanging wall in moving upward relatively to the footwall.