Thermal Analysis of Polymers: Fundamentals and Applications

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 micro-mechanical 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 bookThermal 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. R. Bruce Prime, PhD, is a consultant to industry and government and a recognized authority on the cure and properties of cross-linked polymer systems. During his thirty-year career with IBM, he led teams responsible for developing and implementing polymer applications for printer and information storage technologies. He holds four patents and is the author of more than fifty technical papers and the chapter on thermosets in Thermal Characterization of Polymeric Materials. Dr. Prime is a Fellow of SPE and NATAS and was the 1989 recipient of the Mettler-Toledo Award in Thermal Analysis. He maintains the Web site www.primethermosets.com.