Question: What is a Polymer?

Sam Briggs answered on 13 Jun 2016:

Hi 845cesf28,

Great question! So you know how a normal chemical, let’s take acetone, is comprised of three carbons an oxygen and a few hydrogens? Well imagine if you lined up lots of individual chemicals in a line (the monomers) and then linked them together into a chain (the polymer) then you get chemicals that can bend and twist and form large networks. We can finely tune the length and charge of polymers so that they can be used for a variety of tasks. A lot of things we use everyday are made from polymers, such as the Teflon coating on your non-stick frying pan, to the cling film on your food, to the drinking bottles that we have and indeed the polystyrene packaging for our products that we buy. Poly is a prefix we use to put in front of the monomer name, in this case styrene, a form of six member end carbon ring attached to an alkyl chain, to signify that it has been made into a monomer.

Hope that helps?