ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the National Bureau of Standards’ (NBS) Thermal and Oxidative Degradation of Polymers, relating the context in which the publication appeared, its impact on science, technology, and the general public, and brief details about the lives and work of the author. Thermal and Oxidative Degradation of Polymers report a new approach that studies the effects of molecular-level structure of polymers on their thermal stability and flammability properties instead of a traditional global thermal-balance approach. This series of studies is built upon the pioneering work on thermal degradation of polymers conducted at NBS from the late 1940s to early 1970s. Detailed thermal degradation models were developed based on random initiation, depropagation of free radicals, and termination of free radicals; calculations were made with the assumption of steady-state free radical concentration, and without that assumption. The molecular-level study of the thermal degradation and flammability properties of polymers was pursued further by Marc Nyden and coworkers at NIST.
