Quality control with NMR: Selected examples and applications in polymer industry

In the polymer industry, the quality control of materials is an essential subject. Starting material, final products and various stages in between are to be tested in order to guarantee quality. The majority of test methods measures mechanical properties which often do not reveal the origin of possible deviations in quality. In polymer research, high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is often used for investigation of the molecular properties, which are essential for the macroscopic mechanical behaviour of a product [1-3]. However, high-end NMR equipment is often too expensive and requires scientists for operation. Thus there is a considerable need in analytical equipment which combines ease of handling by untrained personnel, small footprint and minimal service and maintenance requirement. One possibility is low-resolution (LR) or time domain (TD) NMR (Fig. 1, [4]). Unlike most of the mechanical testing methods, TD-NMR is a non-destructive and non-invasive method.