Guest Post by Dr. R. Bruce Prime In this post we describe how DMA can contribute to the study of cure kinetics. We will concentrate on areas where DSC fails to yield useful kinetic data or where Tg is the preferred or even the only way to get a handle on the kinetics. One example is phenolic based thermosets described in the last post, where the endothermic mass loss ... [Click to Continue...]

Guest Post by Dr. R. Bruce Prime In the previous posts in this series we introduced basic principles of kinetics and the application of DSC to measure cure kinetics. Here we describe how thermogravimetric analysis or TGA can be applied to thermoset cure when the loss of mass is an integral part of the cure chemistry. The most common example is phenolics, where each bond ... [Click to Continue...]

Guest Post by Dr. R. Bruce Prime In Parts 1 - 5 of this series we have described basic kinetic principles, how to measure activation energy E, the role of isothermal DSC in kinetic analyses, and time-temperature superposition kinetics. Each of those may be viewed as a tool in our kinetics tool box. Here we describe how they were all used to solve an actual problem involving a ... [Click to Continue...]

Guest Post by Dr. R. Bruce Prime In previous posts in this series we have described basic kinetic principles, how to measure activation energy E and its constancy or variation with conversion, and the role of isothermal DSC in kinetic analyses. Here we add yet another tool: time-temperature superposition or TTS kinetics. TTS kinetics was introduced in the June 2, 2014 post. ... [Click to Continue...]