Thermogravimetric Analysis—IR Spectroscopy: An Important Technique for the Study of Polymer Degradation

The combined technique of thermogravimetric analysis - infrared spectroscopy, TGA/IR, provides very useful information to enable the understanding of the degradation scheme of a polymer. In addition to the usual weight loss information that is produced from the TGA portion of the experiment, the infrared spectra that are obtained permit temporal resolution of the gases that are evolved from the degrading polymer. In this paper, several systems that have been studied in these laboratories are reviewed and some of the mechanistic information that has been obtained is elucidated.