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The units, which we will refer to ‘beads’ are just representatives of chemical building block structures of a polymer.
One of the most well known polymer is ‘Teflon’, used in the ‘non-stick’ cooking utensils. It has a simple chemical structure:
Most other polymers have chemical structure which are more complicated than the Teflon. In fact, the number of beads and the nature their chemical structures help to determine the
properties of polymeric materials. The number of these repeating beads in a polymer chain can be as few as less than ten to perhaps hundreds of thousands. Sometimes a polymer can also have different beads
arranged either in the successive, sequences or in a random manner. Quite often the successive beads are joined by a common atom which forms the skeleton of the whole polymer molecule. The most common skeletal
atom is the carbon (C) atom, such as the Teflon example shown above (note that the F’s which are referred to fluorine atoms are attached alongside the carbon skeletal atoms.
Unlike most solids, where the atomic structures are more or less fixed, chain-like structures such as polymers can conform to many different structures with very complicated interactions between
the beads. However, these intricate details are rather unimportant when considering polymer properties on length scale much larger than the size of a bead. In other words, under similar conditions, different polymers
should have the same universal chain-like nature.
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