Friday, April 13, 2012

Egg Block Copolymer

Sifting through the detritus left behind after another Easter weekend, I came upon a few empty, abandoned plastic Easter eggs. Just for fun, I thought it might be fun to make an "oligomer" out of the polymeric ova.


This random block copolymer shows a low polydispersity index (PDI): exactly one, since there's just one strand! Manufacture should be trivial, since the component blocks literally snap together. Sadly, previous force testing (with my foot) indicates that we probably need to increase the shatter resistance.


Theoretically, to spiral one more "meta" layer downward, one could recycle eggshell-derived plastics into next year's Easter eggs!


What would a post about Easter eggs be without an Easter egg?

2 comments:

  1. "Egg Block Copolymer"

    Sounds like some sort of fancy, scientific birth control.

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  2. What you have there is an amyloid fibril (i.e., prion).

    ReplyDelete