ABSTRACT
Polymers play a key role in the development of pharmaceutical products. In particular, they are used as excipients in dosage forms and as packaging materials, hence there has been a consistent interest in characterising these materials in order to optimise their performance. Furthermore, the increasing use of polymer-based controlled release devices and the greater sophistication of packaging technology has meant that the need to understand the material properties of pharmaceutical polymers has become even more marked. Clearly, there is no reason why techniques such as dielectric spectroscopy and dynamic mechanical analysis, which are widely used in the polymer science field, may not simply be applied to polymers of pharmaceutical interest. In this area, therefore, a direct transfer of technology and expertise could take place, as the usefulness of these techniques has already been established and the interpretation of dielectric data is in many ways more developed than in areas such as colloid science (described in Chapter 4). The use of dielectric analysis in the study of pharmaceutical polymers therefore represents a field which may be easily taken forward and which would allow useful information to be obtained more or less immediately.
