tridork wrote:
I'm a bit of a pedant too. When I say neoprene, in this context, I mean the blown rubber stuff that forms most of the wetsuit material. I am leaving the jersey part of the material out of the discussion for now.
I believe the blown rubber neoprene behaves similar to a "sponge" on your kitchen counter, at least Partially. Those sponges are open cell foams and absorb water by filling the bubbles with water. That's part of it. If you let one of those sponges dry out for a week, it will get hard, inflexible and difficult to use. If however, you wet the dry sponge, then wring out as much water as you can, all the bubbles will be empty of water but the material of the sponge itself will be pretty damp. It remains flexible and pliable.
I believe the blown rubber part of a wetsuit behaves similar to a damp sponge by your sink. The blown rubber in a wetsuit is closed cell foam and the bubbles don't fill up with water like a kitchen sponge does, but the rubber still absorbs water, just like your kitchen sponge
Try wrapping a dry sink sponge around your finger. Doesn't work. Try putting on a 6 month dried out wetsuit on in the spring. Now take a dry wetsuit out of storage, put it in water for a while (several days?) then hang to dry (so it's fully dry to the touch) now put on that wetsuit. Hey presto Emilio is right :-)
Without in depth scientific study, neither of us can be 100% sure we are right, but using the understanding of similar products we can become pretty confident of how they perform. And of course why and how it works is actually secondary. Sure it's fun to debate, but at the end of the day, Emilio is right, it works so I do it, and getting into a wetsuit the first time in the spring is a little bit easier :-)
The pedant in me is totally up for trying to unpack that further. Yep, notwithstanding others' occasionally incredulous reactions, I actually enjoy trying to figure out how stuff works and why, and I find it especially interesting when people who seem like they should understand something better than I do say things that don't make sense to me.
Maybe rubber in general, or blown closed cell rubber (neoprene) in particular, has some degree of surface porosity, and water being superficially absorbed into it increases its elasticity for some reason? I can't quite get my head around how/why that would be true, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding something about the qualities of rubber in general or blown rubber specifically. If you stretched a rubber band underwater, would it stretch more than a dry rubber band before breaking? Doesn't seem like it to me, but maybe I'm missing something.
I'm not sure kitchen sponges are a good analogy for neoprene, because they are 1) open-celled and, more importantly, 2) often made of materials that are themselves absorbent, i.e. they don't just absorb water into their open-celled holes, but into the material (usually cellulose fiber, I think) itself. Same for paper, doesn't seem like a great analogy for rubber. If I filled my DeSoto neoprene swim cap with water and hung it up by the chin strap, would some of the water it was holding eventually seep all the way through the neoprene and drip onto the floor? Doesn't seem like it to me, but again, maybe I'm missing something?
If I'm going astray somewhere, and the pedant in you is still willing to humor the pedant in me, by all means point it out.
