ABSTRACT
In Chapter 7, we mentioned that curing can be driven by irradiation as well as heat. Anyone who has had a cavity filled has seen an example of this. In DMA, it is very easy to track the development of mechanical strength during a cure, although one should not assume that the degree of cure tracks perfectly with that. Work by Stanbury and Newman suggests in some systems that direct monitoring of the cure by FTIR or Raman is also needed.1 Photoreactions are not limited to curing and photodegradations can also be studied in the DMA. This is normally done as an accelerated aging test, with very high light intensities to minimize the instrument time needed.
