How many of us have confronted a massive problem in your business that is really holding your company back?  Typical examples are production problems leading to large scrap losses, scheduling delays due to capacity issues, new product failures after launch.  This list goes on. Where do you start to sort through the issues.  I have worked on some “hairy” problems over my ... [Click to Continue...]

  I thought that since this a pretty techy type of blog that a "Chemistree" might be an appropriate image for our Holiday Greeting.  Image source: https://imgur.com/1qvnB Thanks and Happy Holidays to all our readers and Best Wishes for a Prosperous New Year We’ll be back after the first of the year with a new line-up of topics for 2013. ... [Click to Continue...]

During the lamination of B-staged prepregs to make printed circuit boards, the partially cured resin-impregnated glass cloth is subjected to a nonisothermal temperature profile. This causes the resin to flow over the circuit traces and chemically react forming an intractable fully cured network. The viscosity profile determines the flow window, or time when the resin is ... [Click to Continue...]

In the last post we described the experimental set-up to be able to measure the glass transition temperature and degree of cure during aborted rheometer runs.  In this post we will present some experimental data as a case study. To correlate the conversion, Tg, and viscosity during non isothermal during, the rheometer runs were aborted at specified time intervals, the ... [Click to Continue...]

Characterizing thermosetting polymers poses an interesting challenge to the thermal analyst. Many processing applications require the polymer to flow into a mold or consolidate during lamination, and concurrently undergo a chemical reaction to develop a fully cross-linked network. Because of the complexity of thermosetting polymer processing, the ability to understand the ... [Click to Continue...]