From Reverse Engineering to Quality Control to Microplastics.

The polymer industry is one of the world’s largest industrial sectors. Greater than 95% of all products contain polymers of some sort. These products range across items like automobiles, pharmaceuticals, toys, packaging, computer and cell phones, and so on.

There are a few areas where characterizing these polymer-based objects can be important: first is reverse engineering to facilitate product development in a highly competitive marketplace; second is quality control to identify product defects or failures; and third is the rapid and accurate identification of microplastics present in the environment.

IR spectroscopy is especially well suited for the analysis of polymers in an industrial setting. As a nondestructive analytical tool, IR is highly specific, sensitive and particularly well suited for the nondestructive of polymer-based materials.   

Examples will be shown for each of these cases.