SillY Putty Lab Essays - Matter, Polymers, Manufacturing, Chemistry

Silly Putty Lab By: Grade 10 Science: Enriched Period 5 Purpose: Relate the amount of glue used to the bounce of the silly putty. Find the correlation between silly putty and glue used. Hypothesis: I believe that if I add more glue it will decrease the bouncing ability of the silly putty. I believe this because glue will take some of the kinetic energy of the bounce through heat. Also, I think that adding glue would make the collision more inelastic. Therefore, having less momentum from the collision and reaching a shorter height overall. Materials: Elmer's White glue Sodium borate Water 100 mL beaker 25 mL graduated cylinder Test Tube Procedure: Measure the 15mL of water into the graduated cylinder with 3g of borax and place it into a beaker. Stir for 30 seconds. Allow for settling. Add 20 millilitres of water into the graduated cylinder. Decant the putty into the beaker after adding the indicated amounts of glue (5mL on start). Stir or mix the beaker. Remove the now made silly putty from the beaker. Roll it into a ball as close to as possible to an ideal sphere. Repeat the above steps but with 10mL of glue instead of 5mL. Repeat the above steps but with 15mL of glue instead of 10mL. Measure the height the ball of silly putty dropped from 1 meter from a ruler. Repeat the measure 9 more times for each different putty made. Take the mean of those heights. Note that if one finds more data is needed, getting more data is simple by just repeating the above steps with more glue. At some point however, the amount of glue used causes the putty to be more fluid than solid causing bounce to be very difficult to test, if at all possible. Observations: Amount of Glue (mL) Heights Listed in Order (cm) Average 5 30,23,22,27,22,35,24,23,28,28 26.2cm 10 22,19,18,19,25,23,22,20,23,21 21.2cm 15 15,17,18,18,20,12,15,16,15,15 16.1cm Graph: Analysis: Assuming bounce is linear with respect to amount of glue we can use the above graph to draw some conclusions. The average bounce height decreases as the more glue is added to the silly putty. The graph does indeed support my hypothesis of a negative correlation between amount of glue used and height. The reason why the glue causes this to happen to the silly putty is because is because of the inelasticity of glue giving away some of the energy to the ground as heat, and by conservation, less for the bounce itself. It is also possible that glue causes the silly putty to lose flexibility. This makes it more difficult for the silly putty to bounce. Conclusion: My hypothesis was verified. Glue decreased the height of the bounce of the silly putty and for bouncing putty manufacturers as little glue as possible should be used. I was able to reach this conclusion by making controlled experiments checking the height in relation to glue and later analyzing the results and noticing and downward linear trend.