Please provide brief, concise, and complete answers to the following questions.

1) Your competition’s plastic outdoor chairs historically failed within a few months of being put in the Arizona sun. Your loungers would last longer by 3X. Then, their furniture stopped failing and began lasting longer than your product. The chairs look the same to the eye. What can you do to conclusively figure out what they did? (You can purchase their chairs).

2) You are manufacturing plastic spacers for Claymore mines that prevent the explosive devices from prematurely firing. You had been using Nylon-6, but switched to Delrin because it was less affected by humidity. Now the mines are accidently exploding right and left and the military is getting annoyed. Provide a hypothesis for what is happening based on what you know about polymer shortcomings. How would you fix the problem? (The military won’t let you change the military specification and swap out the Delrin).

3) You just heard that some tree huggers have found micro-plastic contamination in your companies bottled spring water. Your management dumps the crisis in your lap since you're a materials scientist. How do you verify that there is a problem and, assuming it is real, how do you fix the problem?

5) You are charged to create a new polymeric sponge to absorb large scale oil spills. You chose to make a gel in a hydrocarbon solvent made from a mixture of hexanes and benzene. Identify which monomers you would use and explain why each one was selected.

6) Why does natural rubber form deep cracks and fail? How could you retard this process without ruining its elastomeric properties?

7) In your own words, explain what the heat distortion temperature is and how it relates to physical/mechanical properties of a polymer.

8) Why do silicone encapsulants cause more catastrophic failures in printed wiring boards than epoxy encapsulants? Think about physical properties and environmental conditions.

9) Explain the Barus or die effect in polymer melts during extrusion.

10) You are in orbit and you are not sure whether or not a part you are holding in your gloved hand is made from unfilled polysulfone or polyetherether ketone. You have no laboratory tools and you are in a space suit in vacuum. How can you tell which thermoplastic you have?

Please provide brief, concise, and complete answers to the followin...