Change of glass transition temperature of polymers containing gas

The industries use polymer materials for many purposes for they have many m erits. The costs of these materials take up too great a proportion of the o verall cost of products that use these materials as their major material. I t is advantageous for polymer industries to reduce these costs. The microce llular foaming process was developed in the early 1980s to solve this probl em and has proved to be quite successful. Microcellular foaming process uses inert gases such as CO2, N-2. As these g ases solve into polymer matrices, many properties are changed. Glass transi tion temperature is one of these properties. DSC, DMA are devices that meas ure glass transition temperature, but these are not sufficient to measure t he temperature of a polymer containing gas. In this paper, we devised a new tester that uses magnetism. We used this new device to acquire data on the changed glass transition temperature and make a new model that can predict the change of glass transition temperature as a function of quantity of ga s. Using this new model, the change of glass transition temperature can be estimated as a function of weight gain of gas. The new model proved that Ch ow's model is inappropriate to predict the change of glass transition tempe rature of polymer matrices containing gas. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. A ll rights reserved.