Poly(1-cyanoethylene/1-phenylethylene/but-2-ene-1,4-diyl)

Serious LEGO fans know that ABS is the plastic that makes up those little bricks. Some of those go further and know that this is a polymer made up of acrylonitrile, butadiene and styrene. But what is that? Let's take a step back and learn a little bit about polymers. A polymer is like a chain. Each link of a chain is identical, and the difference between two chains of the same material is simply the number of links. The process of connecting one link to the next is the same whether you're talking about the third link, the thirtieth, or the three thousandth.



In a polymer, the individual links are small molecules that get connected together to make one big long molecule. For instance, PVC, or polyvinylchloride, starts out with separate molecules of chloroethane made up of two carbon atoms, three hydrogen atoms, and one chlorine atom. In the image below I show just five molecules coming together to make a short chain (color coded to make them easier to see), but in a polymer you will have hundreds or thousands of links connected to each other.



ABS is a more complex polymer made of three pieces. The A is acrylonitrile (blue in the picture below), B is butadiene (magenta) and S is styrene (red). This is called a copolymer. You could put these together in any number of different ways. For instance, the chain could be ABSABSABSABSABSABS, or AAABBBSSSAAABBBSSS, or AAAAABSAAAAABSAAAAABS. The different patterns, and relative amounts of the three pieces, will lead to polymers with different properties. I wasn't able in a quick search to find the exact mix in the plastic that LEGO uses, so I showed one industrial instance that divides the chains up into two blocks - sections of repeating ASASAS and other sections of repeating BBBBB. This plastic is produced in small pellets (often with color agents and other inclusions, though my photo just shows some raw uncolored pellets) which are then used for the injection molding process.

Fossil Fuels

Okay, I've let this slide, but I want to spend a few posts talking about energy. I noted a few days back that the bulk of electricity generation involves the heating of water to make steam, which then drives turbines. In most countries water is heated by the burning of fossil fuels (in the US this accounts for about 70% of electricity generation) such as coal. About 300 million years ago, dense forests got slowly buried underground. The process of time and pressure transformed this plant matter into what we know today as coal, so this is essentially stored and concentrated solar energy, from the ancient photosynthesis of those plants. Today we dig up this coal (here's an excellent Marion 182m Shovel used in coal mining by Redjack Ryan),



transport it, usually by train (coal car by Monteur),



and then burn the coal in a plant such as the Kingsnorth Power Station (here from Legoland Windsor).



BTW, the real Kingsnorth plant has been the site of several high profile protests by environmental activists. It seems that tiny little ABS activists have also been to Windsor:

Happy Integrated Circuit Day

I'm sure I'm not the only one here who start their online day with Google as their homepage. Anyway, today's Google doodle honors Robert Noyce, who, along with Jack Kilby, invented the integrated circuit (here much larger, in ABS rather than silicon, by Dave and John Xandegar). Over the past half century, our whole world has been turned upside down by the technology flowing from their initial work.

Acrylonitrile

I've previously discussed polymers. A polymer is a long chain made up of repeated molecules linked together. The plastic that makes up LEGO bricks is ABS, a compound polymer made of three different parts. Nathan Proudlove was originally going to produce all of these in brick form, but due to the size of the project limited himself to a beautiful rendition of acrylonitrile. The black spheres represent carbon atoms, the white are hydrogens, and the blue sphere is a nitrogen. You can also see that two of the carbons are connected by a double bond (two pairs of shared electrons), and the carbon and nitrogen are connected by a triple bond (three pairs).