Chemical Analysis of Additives in Plastics

This book is designed as a practical text for use in the laboratories of the plastic producer and user industries and by others such as universities and institutions who are concerned with problems associated with additives and adventitious impurities in polymers. It is now about 30 years since the author wrote his first book on this subject and much has happened in the field since then. For example powerful new analytical tools have been made available to the chemist by a combination of various chromatographic techniques with methods of identifying separated additives and their degradation products by techniques based on infrared and mass spectrometry. In particular supercritical fluid chromatography combined with mass spectrometry has come to the fore. Combinations of polymer pyrolysis with gas chromatography with mass spectrometric identification of the pyrolysis products is throwing new light on what happens to antioxidants and other polymer additives during polymer processing and a products' life. Similarly evolved gas analysis and then thermogravimetry and dynamic scanning calorimetry is proving very useful in antioxidant loss studies. The book is an up-to-date coverage of the present state of knowledge on the subject of polymer additive systems and as such should be extremely useful to workers in the field.