Polymeric Materials and Interfaces Laboratory

Department of Wood Science and Forest Products, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061 Polymeric Materials and Interfaces laboratory, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061 Department of Chemistry, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061... 

Department of Chemical Engineering and Polymeric Materials and Interfaces Laboratory, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061... 

Farong Huang is a member of the Chinese Society of Composites and Director of Key Laboratory for Specially Functional Polymeric Materials and Related Technology of the Ministry of Education at ECUST. His research interests focus on the design, synthesis and chemical modification of specialty polymers, the surface, interfaces and manufacture techniques of advanced polymeric composites, and the functional polymeric materials. He is an author or coauthor of more than 200 article as well as 4 books. He has contributed to more than 30 Chinese patents. 

Polymeric materials then, whether natural (such as cellulose, resins, and proteins) or synthetic (such as polyolefins, nylons, and acrylics), behave in reproducible ways when exposed to pyrolysis temperatures. This permits the use of pyrolysis as a sample preparation technique to allow the analysis of complex materials using routine laboratory instruments. Pyrolytic devices may now be interfaced easily to gas chromatographs, mass spectrometers, and FT-IR spectrometers, extending their use to solid, opaque, and multicomponent materials. Laboratories have long made use of pyrolysis for the analysis of paint flakes, textile fibers, and natural and synthetic rubber and adhesives. The list of applications has been expanded to include documents, artwork, biological materials, antiquities, and other complex systems that may be analyzed with or without the separation of various layers and components involved. 

JOSEPH D. MENCZEL PhD. a recognized expert in thermal analysis of polymers with some thirty years of industrial and academic experience, is Assistant Technical Director at Alcon Laboratories. He has researched more than 120 polymeric systems in which he studied calibration of DSCs, glass transition, nucleation, crystallization, melting, stability, mechanical and micromechanical properties of polymers, and polymer-water interactions. Dr. Menczel holds six patents and is the author of seventy scholarly papers. He is the author of two chapters in the book Thermal Characterization of Polymeric Materials In conducting DSC experiments, Dr. Menczel found a crystal/amorphous interface in semicrystalline polymers, which later became known as the rigid amorphous phase. He is also credited with developing the temperature calibration of DSCs for cooling experiments,... 

If techniques based upon fluorescence and phosphorescence spectroscopy are going to gain acceptance as routine tools in the industrial laboratory, they must prove their merit by establishing that they can provide important information about typical polymeric industrial materials. Such materials are frequently prepared from recipes, where the recipes themselves have been optimized for product performance and not for structural simplicity. This means that one is dealing with complex materials composed of mixtures of homopolymers and various kinds of copolymers. These may generate microphase structures, interfaces and interphase regions. One normally believes that the microscopic structure of the material and its dynamic response are somehow responsible for its desirable properties. 

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