Characterisation of Polymers by Thermal Analysis

Thermal Analysis (TA) has become an indispensable family of analytical techniques in the polymer research. The increased importance of these techniques can be seen as the result of three more or less parallel developments: a tempestuous development of TA measuring techniques in combination with a high degree of automation; the strongly increased understanding of the underlaying theory; and the increasing knowledge of the relation between the polymers’ chemical structure and their physical properties. These areas, especially the third, are still in their developmental stages. The increasing knowledge of the dependence of physical properties on chemical structure just accentuated more and more the need for accurate thermoanalytical measurements, and this knowledge is very important for the first stages of the development of new polymeric systems. This book illustrates the applications of a variety of TA techniques, written from a materials characterization, rather than from a TA point of view, with attention being paid to the chemical structure/physical properties correlations.