Brendan Fries
Faculty Sponsor: John Yukich
When the average person thinks about rubber bands, they imagine firing it at a friend. That’s not the case for physicists though. When we think of rubber bands we also think of their thermodynamic properties. This project will be using rubber bands to investigate two relations involving the temperature of a rubber band. The first relation is Force vs. Temperature. Most materials exhibit a positive coefficient of thermal expansion, but this is not the case for rubber bands. The second relation is Adiabatic Stretching vs. Temperature. When rapidly stretching a rubber band, its temperature drastically increases. My first objective of this project is to prove the relation between Force vs. Temperature. The second objective is to investigate Adiabatic Stretching vs. Temperature. Upon completion one should be able to confirm the negative coefficient of thermal expansion of rubber bands. Additionally, draw a relation between some physical property of a rubber band and how its temperature changes as a result of Adiabatic Stretching.