THE DESTRUCTION-FREE ANALYSIS OF POLYMERS BY FOURIER-TRANSFORM INFRARED PHOTOACOUSTIC AND FOURIER-TRANSFORM RAMAN-SPECTROSCOPY - A COMPARISON

With the introduction of rapid-scanning Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) and recently Raman (FT-Raman) spectroscopy, vibrational spectroscopy has been launched into a new era of applications in polymer chemistry and physics. Thus, the increase in sensitivity provided by multiple scanning has led to the breakthrough of new, destruction-free sampling techniques, such as photoacoustic and Raman spectroscopy. This paper provides a comparison between data produced by FTIR photoacoustic and FT-Raman analysis of a range of polymers, and structural information available from both techniques is discussed.