Confocal Raman imaging of polymeric materials

Abstract

Polymers play an essential role in modern materials science. Due to the wide variety of mechanical and chemical properties of polymers, they are used in almost every field of application and are still a dynamic area in the development of new materials with demanding requirements. Raman spectroscopy is one of the standard characterization techniques used to uniquely determine the chemical composition of a polymer. Modern materials, however, are generally heterogeneous, in which various chemical components or polymorphs of the same chemical species can be present in a very small sample volume. For the analysis of such heterogeneous materials, the combination of Raman spectroscopy with confocal microscopy delivers information about the spatial distribution of the various chemical species with a resolution down to 200 nm. The aim of this contribution is to demonstrate the power of confocal Raman imaging for the characterization of heterogeneous polymeric materials. The first section will deal with polymorphs of polypropylene in polymer films, followed by the nondestructive analysis of polymer blends. A later section will deal with multi-layer polymer coatings and paints and finally various additives to polymer matrices will be discussed. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.