THE ANALYSIS OF BIOMEDICAL POLY(ORTHO ESTERS) BY NEAR-IR FOURIER-TRANSFORM RAMAN-SPECTROSCOPY

In this paper near-IR Fourier transform Raman spectroscopy (FT-RS) has been applied to a series of homopolymer and copolymer biodegradable p oly(ortho ester) systems, with the aim of establishing what further in formation it can furnish over and above conventional polymer character ization methods. The data suggest that the technique is able to provid e reasonable information on diol content, furnishing semiquantitative data as a function of methylene number within the homopolymer and copo lymer content in diethanolamines. The complementary nature of FT-IR sp ectroscopy is briefly highlighted as a benchmark to which the FT-RS da ta can be compared.