Shrinkers

Visitors use heat to shrink samples of polystyrene. They compare samples from containers that were shaped in different ways during manufacturing. Visitors learn how industry can shape polystyrene molecules by heating and stretching them to form containers. During the manufacturing process the plastic is heated, stretched into shape, and cooled. This process freezes the molecules in a stretched-out position. When you heated the piece of polystyrene, the molecules returned to their original zigzag shape. Thus, the plastic shrank and became thicker but retained its original shape. [Activity is publicly available through a web crawler capture on Archive.org.]