Why rubber bands get shorter when you heat them

ERJ staff report (DS)

London -- A website called Kitchen Science Experiments shows amateur scientists how to identify heat effects in rubber: When the rubber band is warmed, it shrinks.

The site says, "Most materials expand in all directions as they heat up and unstretched rubber is no exception. But owing to its molecular structure, stretched rubber behaves very differently. Rubber is a polymer made up of long chains of repeating units. At certain points these chains are chemically attached to one another, which is known as cross-linking."

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Kitchen Science Experiments website