Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

hii i m doing a science fair project n my topic is
measuring the strenght of difference types of glue?
so if anyone send me some information about this so i w ill realy appriciate you guys thanks
-mehwish!!

I would start by attempting to refine what properties you are trying to measure with respect to what materials so you can attempt to construct a simple scientific experiment to measure the property of interest using the material of interest.

Different glues have been developed for different applications that behave in different ways. For example, some glues are solvents for some materials and are therefore inappropriate for some applications. In other applications such as gluing PVC pipes, temporarily disolving a portion of the surface of the two pieces and allowing them to meld and harden produces a stronger bond than just trying to fill the gaps.

There are different forces that act on a glue joint. Two common forces are shear forces and tensil forces.

The properties of the materials you are attempting to join have a significant effect on the strength of the joint. In wood working applications, it does not matter if the glue holds fibers from two pieces of wood together only to have the wood split a few fibers away from the joint. These kinds of material failures make it difficult to evaluate the strength of the glue.

You might try entering "Measuring Glue Strength" into a search engine to get some more information that might help you understand these forces and some commercial glue applications. My attempt found about 1.8 million hits so there is a lot of refining to be done!

Good luck.

You might consider using one type of glue in your experiment. For instance, does your glue hold 2 pounds of weight, 4 pounds of weight, and so on when glued to a particular material. You could also alter your material (by sanding wood, for instance) to see if that changes its ability to hold more weight.

You could also study different types (or brands) of glue to determine which one held a (for instance) 5 pound substance to wood the longest. Just a few ideas, but there are a lot of great experiments you can perform with glue. Think them through to make sure they are repeatable, easy to understand and thoughtful.

Kali

Hi mehvykhan!

If you provide "how do I measure the strenghts of glues?" to answers.com, you get a more manageable set of 178 hits. The different types of glue seem to covered in the output.

Some notes:

1. Subtle wording changes can have a big impact on the output.
2. Stick to the the "Web Search" results rather than the "Sponsored Links," which are just trying to sell you something. Links of people trying to sell you something sometimes show up in "Web Searches."

Hi mehvykhan!

Oops, mea culpa (my fault or my sin) I’m sorry. I should have run spell check, my spelling is terrible. (I posted the last entry from someone else’s computer, and didn’t know where tools were located.)

In the query I proposed to answers.com, “strenghts� is spelled incorrectly. Of course, it should be “strengths,� and the query becomes “how do I measure the strengths of glues?�

Now, the query has about 38,000 hits. Still large, but more manageable, because answers.com does a good job in ranking hits.

Indeed, the first result is a science buddies project! And there are several science projects near the top.

You might look at some of the output to focus the query, if the results aren't immediately apparent. For example, “what science projects measure the strengths of glues?,� yields just science projects.

Please post back if you need more help.