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Nuffield Foundation
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These resources have been reviewed and selected by STEM Learning’s team of education specialists for factual accuracy and relevance to teaching STEM subjects in UK schools.
Plastics
This is one of the 18 Background Books published for Stage II of the Nuffield Chemistry Sample Scheme. The books were highly illustrated and designed to be attractive. This book describes applications of chemistry to making plastics and explaining their properties.
There are 5 parts to this book:
*Part 1: What are plastics?
This part introduces plastics as mouldable materials that consist of long chain molecules.
*Part 2: How polymers are made
This describes addition and condensation polymerisation at a level suitable for a post-16 course.
*Part 3: The structure of polymers
This part has useful diagrams which help to explain how polymer properties are related to chain length, crystallinity and cross linking. The section on molecular manipulation is pitched at advanced level and illustrates the differences between atactic and isotactic polymers.
*Part 4: Some common uses
This part gives an advanced-level outline of the structure, properties and uses of five common plastics.
*Part 5: The plastics industry
This part includes some clear and useful diagrams to illustrate injection moulding, blow moulding, vacuum forming, extrusion and lamination..
The book was first published in 1967. Older names are used for some chemicals and the uses described date back to the 1960s.
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