By connecting the TGA instrument to an FT-IR instrument, a highly efficient and powerful system has been created where the substances emitted from the TGA instrument upon heating are transported to the FT-IR instrument through a heated transfer line and can be identified. Highly detailed information helps to investigate materials in a more complete way, and you can also get great help in failure investigations regarding problems during process manufacturing of polymeric materials. The TGA instrument accurately measures the amounts and the FT-IR instrument identifies the evolved products.

When different types of material are heated using the TGA instrument and lower temperatures, both moisture and, in many cases, other volatile components will be released. With the help of the FT-IR instrument, these substances can now be identified while the TGA instrument quantifies the components.

Degradation processes for polymeric materials can be investigated with TGA. By now connecting to the FT-IR instrument, these decomposition processes can be studied in more detail and important information is available that is very useful for the processes where polymeric materials are manufactured but also for the intended use of a particular product.

If you have complex blends with polymers, plasticizers, solvents and moisture, it may be difficult to find the plasticizer in a TGA analysis. On the other hand, if you have connected the FT-IR and look at what is being released you can easily identify and quantify the plasticizer.

After the manufacturing of products in some materials, a finishing process is required, which simply removes the remaining volatile components from the materials. With TGA-FT-IR you can study how much and what remains after this process and as a result make optimizations of this process. Sometimes you can feel bad odors from manufactured polymer products and this can also be studied with this instrumentation.

In case of polymeric material problems, the TGA-FTIR instrumentation can be a very valuable tool in the process of finding root causes. There may be many components in a polymer matrix that needs to be investigated both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Contamination of materials or manufacturing details can be easily investigated with TGA-FTIR. This can be something that often induces major problems and costs for companies. With this instrumentation you can get quick answers and take appropriate action.