Analysis of Artificially Weathered PET and a Separate PET Hydrolysis Evaluation Using the 4300 Handheld FTIR Authors

Elucidating chemical changes in carbon fiber composites prior to physical degradation has been effectively demonstrated using handheld FTIR analyzers [1]. This application note shows that a handheld infrared spectrometer is equally effective at measuring early onset chemical changes in environmentally stressed PET polymer, which precede cracking and other physical degradation processes. This is an important issue in applications where polymers (as well as other materials such as paints and coatings) are exposed to environmental conditions varying from climatic conditions that depend on their geographic locale to complete submersion, as in the case of marine paints. The commercial availability of handheld FTIR spectrometers affords the capability of nondestructively measuring areas of large polymer sheets, as well as other coatings.