ABSTRACT
A variety of situations call for the identification of polymers. A customer wishes to paint or glue an item or to use an object in a novel environment. It may be awkward or impossible to obtain the composition from the supplier. In another common case, it may simply be detective work to find a chemical reason why a competitor’s product behaves differently from your own. Contaminants in fabrication plants can be very hard to trace. For example, a small amount of a highly unsaturated polymer, such as natural rubber, can prevent the proper cross-linking of a large amount of a more saturated material, such as butyl or ethylene propylene diene monomer (EPDM) rubber.
