ABSTRACT
Polymer chemists that work in basic or applied research have knowledge and skills relating to the creation of polymeric structures with controlled characteristics or to the development of end products based on polymers. In the world of polymer chemistry, when dealing with dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) in polymer investigation, there often are initial misunderstandings. On one side, the method is only thought of as an excellent technique for determining the glass transition temperature of polymers, which is obvious if some requirements related to the appearance of the sample are fullled. This is partially true because DMA is a method to determine the relaxation in polymers and, usually, α-relaxation is associated with glass transition. However, DMA offers much more information than just a temperature value. On the other side, the stress-strain curve is sometimes erroneously considered to be the method’s expected result. The stress-strain curve is the result of a simple tensile test, with the stress that is applied to the sample increasing linearly in time.
