Investigating the Relationship Between Rubber Band Number and Breaking Force

Rubber bands are used for a wide variety of things in our everyday life. The uses of a rubber band are endless, from tying flash cards together, to keeping trash bags secure, and everything else in between. Despite its incredible versatility, many people don’t realize the true relationship between the number of rubber bands and the resulting tensile strength that comes with. Our study aims to find whether more rubber bands increases the tensile strength of the system linearly or exponentially. We hypothesized that a greater number of rubber bands would increase the tensile strength linearly rather than exponentially. After testing, we were able to find that as we increased the number of rubber bands, the force required to snap them did in fact increase linearly, strengthening our hypothesis. Additionally, we were able to take this data from our experiments and create a graph, displaying a strong linear relationship between the number of rubber bands and the force required to break them, strengthening our hypothesis even further.